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Video: ABC's This Week
Distributed via e-mail todayThe proposal went through easily last month, with the city's board of education unanimously approving it by default, as it was not pulled for further discussion or a vote. Tina Owen, Lead Teacher of Alliance, said they would be accepting applications from middle-school-age children for the 2009-10 school year immediately.
Marty Lexmond, the director of school innovation for Milwaukee Public Schools, told U.S. News and World Report that such an institution was needed to help adolescents, who are now increasingly publicly identifying their sexual orientation as early as middle school.
Laurie Higgins of the Illinois Family Institute was dismayed that the motion went through with no discernable opposition.
"I'm stunned that the religious leaders, the Christian pastors in Milwaukee, did not rise up in righteous indignation against this school," lamented Higgins. "That is what I find perhaps equally [as] troubling, if not more so."
"I think it's unconscionable to be affirming this in public schools," said Higgins. "This is not an issue for public schools. And kids at 11- and 12- and 13- and 14-[years of age] are confused on many issues - sexuality [being] one of them."
Regina Griggs, executive director of the group Parents and Friends of Ex-Gays and Gays (PFOX), agreed.
"To affirm an 11-year-old? Please," said Griggs. "They haven't even gone through puberty, but they know that they want to have sex with other men and women? I'm sorry, but it's ridiculous."
The original Alliance high school opened four years ago, also with little opposition. Other similar plans across the country, however, have not had it as easy as the Milwaukee school.
In Chicago, plans for a "gay-friendly" high school were recently delayed due to concerns from both sides of the debate, as some feared that the plans amounted to segregating homosexuals. And when Manhattan's Harvey Milk High School opened in 2003, named for an openly homosexual politician of the 1970s, students met with protesters outside the school's doors.
Reading The Corner on NRO you see trends.
Facing Internal Exile many of us are floundering, pondering whether the Party is worth the trouble, questioning if BO is really a clear and present danger and then remarking, after the "debate" of RNC Chair candidates, Monday (moderated by Mullah Norquist) "that's just sad."
You, also, may be less than cheered by the consultants, determined (naturally, and as always) to "separate policy from tactics." Meanwhile, the Democrats are preparing to dissolve the electorate, fulfilling a long-held dream to make a majority of voters dependent for their supper on the Federal Government. Republicans have helped this long-term effort, stupidly perhaps, but well-enough that the new President's "refundable tax credits" may very well be the Straw that breaks the Camel's Back.
Which begs the circular question: Is it too late for the Republican Party? Is it worth the trouble?
Heartening is the sudden emergence, from a pack of wannabe, self-actualized Web 2.0 "movements" of RebuildTheParty.com
I joined trustingly, as if I was disarming a road-side IED, in Bagdhad's Green Zone.
No one in Silicon Valley is more determined to build "the next killer app" than are Republicans ready, perhaps (finally), to heed good advice our leaders should have understood when first printed in the NRODT ("National Review on Dead Trees") after the 1994 Revolution.
That advice was "abandon all illusion of media sympathy" and "build your own lines of communication."
First, Jim Manzi, one of The Chosen-Citizen Contributors to the casual Corner, who had the following brief posting there Monday. He pointed to a column on Ars Technica recommending, among other advice, Rebuild the Party as worth watching (and Joining, TODAY).
Technology and Winning Elections [Jim Manzi]
Below is a letter from Rep. John Blust to fellow GOP Legislators. I think he hits the nail on the head. Have a read:
First of all, welcome to all our new members! I look forward to getting to know each of you and working with you in the coming session!
What happened to Nelson could happen to any one of us if the Democrats thought they could beat us. I am not surprised at all that lies were told. In fact, I would be surprised if the Democrats did not make "vicious and false attacks." I hope that candidates will heed Rep. Stam's request to bring examples to the next caucus. I cannot recall an election cycle where there were not lies told about Republican candidates. In my first Senate race in 1996, new Senator Don Vaughan (12 years after I beat him, he will be Kay Hagan's replacement) put out some of the biggest whoppers about me - paid for and designed by Rand and Basnight. I will lay odds we will see even more of this type campaigning in two years. Let's stop deluding ourselves.
It is for this reason that I am mystified that any of us would be surprised by the Democrats' lies in this latest campaign.Did anyone of us really think this would change with a change in Democrat Speakers? From my first year in 1996, I have known of the true nature of our opposition. That is why during the last 12 years I have not understood the propensity of so many Republicans serving in the legislature to want to be what Bob Novak has called Republicans in Congress, a "comfortable minority." Most of us who remain occupy the safer Republican districts and I fear that is easy to become satisfied just to be in the legislature and gather a few crumbs while the Democrats run the place. We have developed, I fear, a form of Stockholm syndrome. We seem to lose track of the fact that we will not help this state and those we represent until we gain a majority in both chambers.
2010 may well shape up to be a big year for Republicans electorally - if we get our principles back and get our mojo back. The first thing we must get rid of is the belief that the Democrats are our friends. While this may be true on an individual to individual basis, (I personally like almost every one of the Democrats individually) it is certainly not true on a group basis. And even individually, the Democrats would not hesitate to figuratively cut the throat of any Republican who gets in their way if they think they can. One case in point is former Rep. Joni Bowie. She was a rather moderate Republican who in 18 years cooperated with the Democrats as much as any Republican did. But when they wanted her seat in 2004, they re-drew her district to favor Pricey Harrison and put about $300,000 into Harrison's race. Joni's "friendship" meant not a whit to them when it came time to keeping their power! That would be true as to any of us.
The upcoming session should be one in which our priority should be setting up the 2010 election. Let's drop our propensity, wittingly or unwittingly, to help the Democrats to blur the distinctions between themselves and the Republicans and to put Republican fingerprints all over Democrat bills and Democrat policies. Yes, we should vote with them if they are actually right on an issue, but not when they are wrong. We particularly need to stop getting a one percent improvement on a bad bill or a bad idea and then jumping aboard and thinking we accomplished something. Let's work with them if they truly want to work with us and actually listen to our ideas and change something they are doing and if they move some of our bills. But let us be the loyal opposition when they are wrong and when they refuse to do the right thing. Let's not do this out of malice or just to pick a fight, but let us stick to sound, common-sense principle and stand up for what is right.
Let's start with the budget. We all know how pathetic the budget process is. It is drawn up in secret with the input of the very few. There was a spending spree the last five years that set up the current budget crisis the next legislature will have to fix. Wouldn't it have been better if the budgets of these years had received no Republican votes? Let's resist the temptation to vote for a bad budget in return for what, in the large scope of things, is a mere pittance for a particular Republican member. That is what has stained the Republican brand so badly in the eyes of our core voters. Virtually every Republican signs on to the Taxpayer Protection Act or TABOR which caps the growth of spending. For five years the budgets exceeded this rate of increase Had we followed such a constraint in the good years, the state wouldn't be in the fix it is right now. A budget that exceeds these growth restraints is a bad budget! Budgets that have increased state debt by billions without allowing the people to vote on this debt are bad budgets! Let's be for sound budgeting and reforms to the process and let's back that up with action.
The Democrats have not respected the institution and the process in the past. Remember the Senate's advance directive bill that Deborah Ross was running in the House? After our leader got some amendments passed to it in committee, the Democrats put the original bill in another bill and ran it through on a concurrence vote rather than let the House have a chance to affect the bill. (This new law has been heavily criticized by expert practitioners). We need fewer meetings between our leadership and the Speaker which can serve to give away our position. What did these meetings achieve last term? Hackney was an improvement over Black, but when the rubber met the road, Hackney ruled an out-of-order budget to be in order without explanation - just like Black did. When Rep. Stam met with the Speaker to go over proposed rules changes in painstaking detail, the Speaker made a few minor, mostly cosmetic changes, and then boasted of bi-partisan cooperation on the rules. Let's not fall for this trap again.
Only if the Democrats truly "reach across the aisle" should we bargain with them. I have never seen them really "reach across the aisle" like they claim at election time. Improving a bad bill by one half of one percent and going no further is not "reaching across the aisle" and does not constitute the Democrats "working together" with us.
Let's stop thanking them just because they dumped on us, and, in effect ,on the voters who put us there, a little less than they dumped on us in the past. I haven't seen the numbers for the latest election yet, but remember that in the last few elections our caucus has received more total votes than the members of the Democrat caucus on election day. We should therefore not be satisfied with being treated like second class members who have no right to be there and less than the rights and privileges every member of the body deserve!.
So I will help Nelson (Dollar) out on a condition. That condition is that we stop deluding ourselves with some of the past notions and that we determine to be an effective, principled minority party. We can then go back to the voters in two years with a sound alternative to what we all know have been, and likely will still be, unsound Democrat policies that have virtually bankrupted this state and saddled it with costly, inefficient and ineffective state government.
Let's do it for the children!
Who shall save us from these corrupt politicians?That, as Mr. Robinson puts it, was then. Now, today, we have witnessed an expansion of government into every corner of economic and social life that has been as sudden as it has been extraordinary. Having just lived through a presidential election in which the winning candidate cheerfully admitted that his goal was “to spread the wealth around,” we might think Mr. Robinson, a well-known conservative, was making a partisan point. He wasn’t. Over the last several years, he observes, we have witnessed, under a Republican administration, a prescription drug program that “represents the biggest expansion of the welfare state since the Great Society.” At the same time, Congress sharply increased domestic spending and passed “the biggest farm bill in history, a massive transfer of resources to the 2 percent of the population still engaged in agriculture.”
That’s not all. In the campaign that just ended, the Republican candidate was an architect of legislation—the McCain-Feingold Act—that is perhaps the most serious challenge to political free speech in the United States in our lifetime. And what have we to look forward to? Mr. Robinson reminds us that the President-elect has plans to federalize health insurance, a preliminary move toward the nationalization of health care, an industry that accounts for some 17 percent of the country’s gross domestic product. And let’s not forget the promised “tax credits,” i.e., direct cash payments from the Federal government that would, as Daniel Henninger noted in The Wall Street Journal, “place some 48 percent of Americans … out of the income tax system.” Were this to happen, Mr. Robinson notes, it would “fundamentally alter the nature of citizenship itself. Almost half of all Americans would, in effect, have been made the recipients of a vast new entitlement. As that proportion grows, the nation would approach a tipping point.”
Some years ago, the literary critic Paul Fussell began an essay by recalling an advertising slogan for Teacher’s Scotch. “In life, experience is the great teacher. In Scotch, Teacher’s is the great experience.” Clever, but we wonder whether the first sentence is true. Is experience the great teacher? The thing to bear in mind, Mr. Robinson suggests, is that
All that the nation’s founders understood two centuries ago about the imperative of limited government, all that we learned from the long struggle between collectivism and free markets during our own time—all this could soon simply evanesce.We are being asked to unlearn what we know, to surrender the virtues that can only be acquired in conditions of freedom, and to become a lesser people than we are. The land of the free and the home of the brave could soon be transformed into the land of the dependent and the home of the infantilized.
Tocqueville famously warned about that infantilization in the celebrated paragraphs about “democratic despotism” in Democracy in America, that “tutelary” despotism which “extends its arms over society as a whole [and] covers its surface with a network of small, complicated, painstaking, uniform rules through which the most original minds and the most vigorous souls cannot clear a way to surpass the crowd.” As our masters in Washington debate over which industries are to be the recipients of the taxpayers’ largesse, it is worth remembering Tocqueville’s warning with Friedrich Hayek’s admonition that “Economic control is not merely control of a sector of human life which can be separated from the rest; it is the control of the means for all our ends. And whoever has sole control of the means must also determine which ends are to be served, which values are to be rated higher and which lower—in short, what men should believe and strive for.” It is a commonplace to observe that freedom is difficult to achieve but easy, oh-so-easy, to lose. As Hume saw, it is generally not lost all at once, but step by step: government program by government program, regulation by regulation, entitlement by entitlement, until finally, as Tocqueville put it, we find ourselves “nothing more than a herd of timid and industrious animals of which the government is the shepherd.”
This article originally appeared in The New Criterion, Volume 27 December 2008, on page 1
Phil Berger and Paul Stam preside over a weekly joint press conference
at the General Assembly, July 2007
Berger had reportedly been challenged by Sens. Pete Brunstetter of Forsyth and Bob Rucho of Matthews, but was re-elected to speak for the GOP's 20 of 50 state Senators.
Stam was unchallenged for re-election to his second term as House Republican leader, minority leader for 52 of 120 House Members, a ratio of Republican Members that remains unchanged from the 2007 Session.
House Republicans also elected Thom Tillis of Charlotte as Republican Whip, replacing Bill McGee of Forsyth who declined to run for re-election.
Senate Republicans, who alternate with the House every other term to elect a Joint Republican Caucus chairman chose Sen. Eddie Goodall of Union County to replace Dale Folwell of Forsyth.
The 2009 General Assembly convenes Jan. 28, 2009, at Noon.
Mrs. Clinton can hardly contain her excitement at succeeding Condi Rice as head of the State Department. As the Obama Administration fast taking shape is struggling to become "the most diverse," as the Legacy Media already gives the new president credit even if he does not manage to add a single Hispanic or Indian, more or less, and ultimately can't overtake the impressive record compiled by George W. Bush.No Senator or Representative shall, during the Time for which he was elected, be appointed to any civil Office under the Authority of the United States, which shall have been created, or the Emoluments whereof shall have been increased during such time; and no person holding any office under the United States, shall be a member of either House during his continuance in office.
Unless one views the Constitution's rules as rules that may be dispensed with when inconvenient; or as not really stating rules at all (but "standards" or "principles" to be viewed at more-convenient levels of generality); or as not applicable where a lawsuit might not be brought; or as not applicable to Democratic administrations, then the plain linguistic meaning of this chunk of constitutional text forbids the appointment of Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State. I wouldn't bet on this actually preventing the appointment, however.
“Wherever possible go outside the experience of the enemy. Here you want to cause confusion, fear and retreat.”
“Make the enemy live up to his/her own book of rules. You can kill them with this. They can no more obey their own rules than the Christian church can live up to Christianity.”
“Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon. It is almost impossible to counterattack ridicule. Also, it infuriates the opposition, who then react to your advantage.”
“The threat is generally more terrifying than the thing itself.”
“In a fight almost anything goes. It almost reaches the point where you stop to apologize if a chance blow lands above the belt.”
“Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it and polarize it.”
“One of the criteria for picking the target is the target’s vulnerability … the other important point in the choosing of a target is that it must be a personification, not something general and abstract.”
“The enemy properly goaded and guided in his reaction will be your major strength.”
