posted July 13, 2010 06:44 PM         

I happened to be in the room the day John Kerry said he had voted for a war-financing bill before he voted against it. Republicans appropriated the sentence (uttered at a 2004 town hall for veterans in Huntington, West Virginia) and used it to paint Kerry as a flip-flopper. Six years later, it's a better fit for the GOP than it ever was for him.

So many Republicans have changed their ideas on so many major issues that it's hard to keep up. With the return of Congress this week, two of those issues – campaign finance disclosure and climate change – could play out in the Senate over the next month.

What accounts for the shifts? Evolving principles? Pressure from the right? Political Strategy 101, block Democrats and President Barack Obama so they'll fail and look bad? Maybe a slightly more subtle approach -- find fatal flaws in a compromise that under other circumstances (say if a Republican president wanted it passed) you would support, on the theory that the perfect shouldn't be the enemy of the halfway decent or the baby step forward? All of the above? Here are seven reversals that hold clues:

1. Financial disclosure. Prominent Republicans have often made the case that transparency – not limits on campaign spending or contributions -- is the best antidote to corruption. "Republicans are in favor of disclosure," Sen. Mitch McConnell said on NBC's "Meet the Press" in 2000. Seven years later, on the same program, House GOP leader John Boehner declared: "Sunlight is the best disinfectant."

But Boehner voted no last month on the DISCLOSE Act, which requires corporations, unions and some other groups to disclose more information about their campaign activities. It also imposes new restrictions on campaign spending by foreign firms, large government contractors and companies that get taxpayer bailouts. Boehner has said the bill favors some groups over others and would "shred the Constitution." McConnell agrees.

"There clearly has been a change of heart," Ellen Miller, co-founder and executive director of the Sunlight Foundation, told me. She said Republicans are following the lead of the conservative majority on the Supreme Court, which has held that limits on spending are tantamount to limits on free speech. The result, she said, is a "knee-jerk political reaction to any attempts to disclose or regulate in any fashion the raising and spending of political money."

2. Cap and trade. Smithsonian magazine last year traced the history of "cap and trade" to a 1980s meeting of the minds between free-market conservatives and "renegade environmentalists." Their idea was to let companies buy and sell the right to pollute. The first Bush administration used such a system to reduce sulfur dioxide emissions from power plants to reduce acid rain. Emissions trading, as it was called then, was seen from the start as a model for dealing with the larger problem of carbon emissions that contribute to global warming.

But Republicans now tar cap and trade as a job-killing "cap and tax" system. Rep. Mark Kirk of Illinois, running for the Senate, renounced his vote in favor of cap and trade in the House last year. Sen. John McCain of Arizona co-authored a pioneering cap-and-trade bill and introduced it in 2003, 2005 and 2007, then did an about-face last year. Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina stepped in to help write an ambitious economy-wide cap-and-trade bill, but he too has walked away. Some Democrats are now aiming to cap carbon emissions from utilities only, and even that could be a heavy lift.

3. Immigration. McCain, Democratic Sen. Edward Kennedy and President George W. Bush were the prime movers of comprehensive immigration reform in 2006. But Kennedy died, Bush left office and McCain has become a hard-liner as he fights a primary challenge from the right. The 2006 bill strengthened border security but also laid out a path to earned citizenship for some 12 million illegal immigrants already in the country. Obama said in a speech this month that "under the pressures of partisanship and election-year politics, many of the 11 Republican senators who voted for reform in the past have now backed away from their previous support."

The 11 Republicans who supported the 2006 bill and are still in the Senate are McCain, McConnell, Graham, Judd Gregg of New Hampshire, Richard Lugar of Indiana, Bob Bennett of Utah, Susan Collins of Maine, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, Olympia Snowe of Maine, Sam Brownback of Kansas and George Voinovich of Ohio. Obama had a message for them: "Without bipartisan support, as we had just a few years ago, we cannot solve this problem. Reform that brings accountability to our immigration system cannot pass without Republican votes. That is the political and mathematical reality."

4. Deficit spending. Republicans in the Senate have been holding up passage of emergency unemployment benefits for weeks because they want to offset the spending with budget cuts elsewhere. They are also loath to help states cope with rising Medicaid costs or avert mass layoffs of teachers, police and other employees, unless the money to offset the costs is found somewhere else. This call for discipline is a stark contrast to GOP actions during the Bush administration, when two wars, $1.3 billion in tax cuts and a major expansion of Medicare were financed with deficit spending (aka borrowing money).

Many Republicans now say they were wrong. But their timing suggests a double standard (OK to pay for Bush's priorities with borrowed money, but not Obama's). And the battle they have chosen to fight is puzzling. Even deficit hawks say that with more than 15 million unemployed, they're not worried about spending $34 billion for a benefits extension that's temporary and badly needed. As Robert Bixby, president of the anti-deficit Concord Coalition, memorably told The Boston Globe, "I just feel like unemployment benefits wandered onto the wrong street corner at the wrong time, and now they are getting mugged."

5. Bipartisan deficit-reduction commission established by Congress. This reversal early this year involved six Republican co-sponsors of such a commission who voted against their own Senate bill. The six were McCain, Brownback, Mike Crapo of Idaho, John Ensign of Nevada, Kay Bailey Hutchison of Texas and James Inhofe of Oklahoma. McConnell had once supported the idea, but he too voted against it. The bill required an up-or-down vote on the commission recommendations. McConnell and others said they feared the panel might suggest raising taxes.

Obama quickly formed a bipartisan commission by using an executive order, and the hope is that Congress will adopt its consensus proposals. Co-chairman Alan Simpson, a former Republican senator from Wyoming, said it was "the saddest thing" to see "no" votes from senators who had fought for the congressional commission for years. "What was the purpose of that?" he asked at a bipartisan forum Sunday with several dozen governors. "As far as I can discern, it was to stick it to the president."

6. Individual insurance mandate. Conservatives and Republicans once favored a requirement that all or most people buy basic health insurance. Like cap and trade, it was conceived by free-market conservatives as a way to avoid harming the private sector. It also fit with conservative views of personal responsibility and the immorality of freeloading. In 1993, Republicans pushed it as an alternative to an employer mandate. Stuart Butler, a domestic policy expert at the Heritage Foundation, described the individual mandate in 2003 as a necessary part of a "social contract." Republican Mitt Romney signed a health law with a mandate in 2006, when he was governor of Massachusetts.

Now, however, Republican governors and attorneys general are suing the federal government over the individual mandate in the new health law, saying it is unconstitutional. Romney says the federal government has no right to impose such a plan on all states. Butler told me that experience in the last seven years with the federal employee health benefits system and with auto-enrollment (you're enrolled at work or school unless you opt out) suggests the requirement is not necessary to achieve a stable health insurance system with broadly shared risks. Obama's campaign position was similar, but health experts later changed his mind.

7. Medicare spending curbs. Democrats have financed their new health law in part by planning on nearly $500 billion in Medicare savings over the next 10 years. The proposal provoked months of attacks from Republicans. That was a dizzying role reversal from the days when Republicans used to recommend the same types of reductions in future Medicare spending (and had to play defense against attacks from Obama and other Democrats, now having their own role reversal).

In 1995, for instance, Republicans proposed cutting $270 billion over seven years. In 1997, McConnell and McCain were among the Republicans voting for a Balanced Budget Act that cut Medicare by $115 billion over five years. And in his 2008 presidential campaign, McCain proposed combined Medicare and Medicaid cuts of $1.3 trillion over 10 years. Yet last year, as he neared a re-election campaign in a state full of retirees, McCain led the fight against the Democrats' plans to trim Medicare.

Seven issues, scores of lawmakers, an epidemic of head-slapping and rethinking that corresponds to Obama's tenure and the rise of the Tea Party movement. Coincidence? Doubtful. Principles are in the mix, for sure, but nobody should mistake where they are sitting in the car. That would be the back seat, with politics at the wheel.

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Disclose Act http://www.speaker.gov/newsroom/legislation?id=0381
http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2010/07/06/ohio-dems-accu se-senate-candidate-of-flip-flop/?fbid=-nRsX_zQOYW
http://www.politicsdaily.com/2010/07/11/things-republicans-were-for-and-now-are-agains t/

posted July 13, 2010 06:49 PM         

Essay:A Day In The Life of Joe Conservative
From RationalWiki
http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/index.php?title=Essay:A_Day_In_The_Life_of_Joe_Conservative

Joe gets up at 6 a.m. and fills his coffeepot with water to prepare his morning coffee. The water is clean and good because some tree-hugging liberal fought for minimum water-quality standards. With his first swallow of water, he takes his daily medication. His medications are safe to take because some stupid commie liberal fought to ensure their safety and that they work as advertised.

All but $10 of his medications are paid for by his employer's medical plan because some liberal union workers fought their employers for paid medical insurance -- now Joe gets it, too.

He prepares his morning breakfast: bacon and eggs. Joe's bacon is safe to eat because some girly-man liberal fought for laws to regulate the meat packing industry.

In the morning shower, Joe reaches for his shampoo. His bottle is properly labeled with each ingredient and its amount in the total contents because some crybaby liberal fought for his right to know what he was putting on his body and how much it contained.

Joe dresses, walks outside and takes a deep breath. The air he breathes is clean because some environmentalist wacko liberal fought for the laws to stop industries from polluting our air.

He walks on the government-provided sidewalk to the subway station for his government-subsidized ride to work. It saves him considerable money in parking and transportation fees because some fancy-pants liberal fought for affordable public transportation, which gives everyone the opportunity to be a contributor.

Joe begins his work day. He has a good job with excellent pay, medical benefits, retirement, paid holidays and vacation because some lazy liberal union members fought and died for these working standards. Joe's employer pays these standards because Joe's employer doesn't want his employees to call the union.

If Joe is hurt on the job or becomes unemployed, he'll get a worker compensation or unemployment checks because some stupid liberal didn't think he should lose his home because of his temporary misfortune.

It is noontime and Joe needs to make a bank deposit so he can pay some bills. Joe's deposit is federally insured by the FSLIC because some godless liberal wanted to protect Joe's money from unscrupulous bankers who ruined the banking system before the Great Depression.

Joe has to pay his Fannie Mae-underwritten mortgage and his below-market federal student loan because some elitist liberal decided that Joe and the government would be better off if he was educated and earned more money over his lifetime. Joe also forgets that in addition to his federally subsidized student loans, he attended a state funded university.

Joe is home from work. He plans to visit his father this evening at his farm home in the country. He gets in his car for the drive. His car is among the safest in the world because some America-hating liberal fought for car safety standards to go along with the taxpayer funded roads.

He arrives at his boyhood home. His was the third generation to live in the house financed by Farmers' Home Administration because bankers didn't want to make rural loans.

The house didn't have electricity until some big-government liberal stuck his nose where it didn't belong and demanded rural electrification.

He is happy to see his father, who is now retired. His father lives on Social Security and a union pension because some wine-drinking, cheese-eating liberal made sure he could take care of himself so Joe wouldn't have to.

Joe gets back in his car for the ride home, and turns on a radio talk show. The radio host keeps saying that liberals are bad and conservatives are good. He doesn't mention that the beloved conservatives have fought against every protection and benefit Joe enjoys throughout his day. Joe agrees: "We don't need those big-government liberals ruining our lives! After all, I'm a self-made man who believes everyone should take care of themselves, just like I have."

Note: This was originally published (anonymously) under the title A Day in the Life of Joe Republican. But this is a misnomer. In the last 140 years, the Republican and Democratic parties have switched sides several times, with one being conservative and the other being liberal. But labels and party affiliations change. What doesn't change are the underlying political philosophies of liberalism and conservatism, and the fact that the liberals usually turned out to be right and the conservatives turned out to be wrong. And so it goes.

A Day in the Life of a True Conservative

Joe Conservative wakes up in the morning and goes to the bathroom. He flushes his toilet and brushes his teeth, mindful that each flush & brush costs him about 43 cents to his privatized water provider. His wacky, liberal neighbor keeps badgering the company to disclose how clean and safe their water is, but no one ever finds out. Just to be safe, Joe Conservative boils his drinking water.

Joe steps outside and coughs–the pollution is especially bad today, but the smokiest cars are the cheapest ones, so everyone buys ‘em. Joe Conservative checks to make sure he has enough toll money for the 3 different private roads he must drive to work. There is no public transportation, so traffic is backed up and his 10 mile commute takes an hour.

On the way, he drops his 12 year old daughter off at the clothing factory she works at. Paying for kids to go to private school until they’re 18 is a luxury, and Joe needs the extra income coming in. Times are hard and there’re no social safety nets.

He gets to work 5 minutes late and misses the call for Christian prayer, and is immediately docked by his employer. He is not feeling well today, but has no health insurance, since neither his employer nor his government provide it, and paying for it himself is really expensive, since he has a precondition. He just hopes for the best.

Joe’s workday is 12 hours long, because there is no regulation over working hours, and Joe will lose his job if he complains or unionizes. Today is an especially bad day. Joe’s manager demands that he work until midnight, a 16 hour day. Joe does, knowing that he’ll lose his job if he does not.

Finally, after midnight, Joe gets to pick up his daughter and go home. His daughter shows him the deep cut she got on the industrial sewing machine today. Joe is outraged and asks why she doesn’t have metal mesh gloves or other protection. She says the company will not provide it and she’ll have to pay for it out of her own pocket. Joe looks at the wound and decides they’ll use an over the counter disinfectant and bandages until it heals. She’ll have a scar, but getting stitches at the emergency room is expensive.

His daughter also complains that the manager made suggestive overtures towards her. Joe counsels her to be a “good girl” and not rock the boat, or she’ll get fired and they’ll be out the income.

His daughter says she can’t wait until she’s 18 so she can vote for change or go to the Iraq War.

They get home and there’s a message from his elderly father who can’t afford to pay his medical or heating bills. Joe can hear him coughing and shivering.

Joe turns on the radio and the top story is a proposal in Congress to raise the voting age to 25. A rare liberal opinionator states that it’s an attempt to keep power out of the hands of working class Americans. The conservative host immediately quashes him, calling him “a utopian idealist,” and agreeing that people aren’t mature enough to make good choices until they’re at least 25.

Joe chuckles at the wine-swilling, cheese eating liberal egghead and thinks, “Thank God I live in America where I have freedom!”

posted July 14, 2010 08:22 AM         

Entire new agencies of government created.

Health care run by government bureaucrats.

Madatory requirement for the purchase of health insurance.

Boards and panels to decide who gets what treatment or if treatment will be available at all.

Raising the cost of health care for everyone.

Raising health insurance costs for everyone.

O'BomberCare is nothing if not an O'Bomber government power grab.

Yep, some republicans were in favor of a "comprehensive immigration reform bill"...right up until they heard from millions of folks back home who threatened their political careers. That's the reason Bush wasn't able to pass Immigration Reform.

Secure the damned borders and then we'll talk about a "guest worker" program but not an amnesty for illegal aliens.

We already did that back in the 1980s and all it got us was another batch of 20-30 million illegal aliens who also expect amnesty for violating our immigration laws.

posted July 15, 2010 08:17 PM         

it's okay jwhop in case you didn't notice the piece said both parties are guilty of tailoring their platforms for the peanut gallery.

but the above repeated quote has nothing to do with the merits of the republicans' OR faults of democrats' ideas - and everything to do with the stupidity of people who don't know the government from their microwave. it is a classic of our time in 6 words.

posted July 22, 2010 09:43 AM         

Five decades after liberalism began to fail, it's still with us and finding potent ways to diminish liberty. Liberalism has -- or seems to have -- more lives than a cat. It's sustained principally by two things, both powerful: myth and interest. If liberalism as a political and societal force is ever to be marginalized, it first must be separated from the myth that it grows in the same garden of liberty and republican virtues as conservatism and libertarianism. Voters and the public need to learn and appreciate that liberalism is largely a statist creed alien to the nation's heritage.

Within the Tea Party movement, this message has resonated. But the challenge is to spread this message into broader communities, where the independent-minded and the independent voter have little or no familiarity with the argument that liberalism has never been moored to founding principles.

It's through myth that liberalism draws much of its legitimacy. Much of the myth is that liberalism partakes in a common heritage with the aforementioned conservatism and libertarianism (classical liberalism). We are, as liberals would like Americans to believe, all sons and daughters of the revolution; we share broadly in the principles that founded the nation.

But this is untrue. Liberalism's roots are in the middle to late 19th century, not in the late 1700s. It owes far more to Hegel, Marx, and Darwin than it does to Jefferson, Madison, and Hamilton. Hamilton and the Federalists may have desired more energetic government, but they would react with jaw-dropping revulsion at today's statist liberalism. Modern liberalism, which is increasingly a captive of the hard left, is more and more a Marxist construct.

Liberalism is a rejection of the belief that there are universal and enduring truths. It's rooted in relativism and historicism, or the beliefs that truth is situational and changes throughout history and that human nature is malleable. And beginning in the middle to late 20th century, liberalism's march leftward divorced itself from the belief that Providence is the wellspring of liberty and the rights of man.

The great misapprehension by conservatives and freedom-loving Americans has been that liberalism's manifest failures, and conservatism's conspicuous successes, would marginalize liberalism (such was the prevailing conviction with the Carter debacle and Reagan's ascendancy). Empiricism was believed to the antidote to infectious liberalism. But such has not been the case.

Liberalism's claim to compassion, fairness, and equality (of result) resonates with a good portion of the electorate and the public. But, tellingly, liberals have always claimed that they aim to create a more compassionate, fairer, and equal society without diminishing the birthright of liberty. Liberals stoutly deny that consolidating power in a central government to achieve their ends tramples the Founders' intent -- or, moreover, that it reduces freedom.

Most liberals still praise Washington, Jefferson, and Jackson while seeking to increase government and arrange a less free society. But liberalism has always been a silent repudiation of the Founders and founding principles -- and a hypocrisy. From the earliest days, liberals twisted themselves into pretzels trying to rationalize and justify their statism as one with the revolution and founding. When liberals can't persuade Americans that their beliefs square with those of the Founders, they fall to sophistry.

Anyone who has sat through an undergraduate class in political science, political philosophy, or history has been subjected to the argument that there are such things as "negative" and "positive" freedom. However elegant or clever the arguments, there's nothing positive, nor is freedom regarded, when government uses the law and the implicit threat of force to achieve redistributionist ends. Forcibly taking from one person to enhance the "freedom" of another prostitutes the principle of freedom.

Is there really any doubt among honest men and women how Jefferson and Madison would view today's government overreach and mangling of the Constitution? Would these men see liberalism as benevolent or dangerous? Freedom-giving or freedom-taking?

As Thomas Jefferson wrote simply: "I am not a friend to a very energetic government. It is always oppressive."

The other fallback argument liberals make when confronted with their hypocrisy is truer from their standpoint. They argue that the Founders were right in their time, but the times changed. America at its founding was a raw nation of modest coastal commerce, little manufacturing, farmers, and frontier. Limited, decentralized government worked because it was a better fit for the nation as it was.

But with the industrial revolution, with the great influx of immigrants, America changed. Complexity came to the nation with industrialization and population diversity, and so government had to change fundamentally to meet the needs of the new America. Government needed to assume more of a role in the regulation of commerce; it had to attend to the welfare, betterment, and assimilation of immigrants. Government had to erase inequities amongst all Americans.

The argument that a complex America needed greater government, more centralization, and control in Washington reveals a convolution of reason and liberal conceit. If anything, complexity begs more freedom, not less. Simplicity is more susceptible to control. By that understanding, infant America should have been more amenable to strong central government. The notion that a complex America is better-run by a relative handful of Washington politicians and bureaucrats would be farcical if it weren't proving to be such a liability and danger to liberty.

Make no mistake; the Founders would utterly repudiate statist liberalism. After all, the men who made a revolution and then made a nation did so explicitly rejecting the statism of the day: monarchy. One need only read Jefferson and Madison, especially, to appreciate their fear of tyranny developing in the emerging national government. The Founders would be leading the opposition -- one thinks fiercely -- to Mr. Obama and the left.

In the American experience, while liberals have no legitimate claim to the Founders, they do have their ancestors. Modern liberalism is the descendant of early-20th-century progressivism, which was embodied by Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, and yes, Teddy Roosevelt (progressivism enjoyed favor in both parties then -- at least portions of both). Roughly, Wilson is the liberals' Jefferson, while FDR is their Washington. But to read anything of Wilson's thoughts and ideas about government and its relationship to the people is to read a man who is nearly the antithesis of Jefferson.

Today, we are a nation divided; a nation, if you will, of two peoples with distinctly different heritages -- politically, at least. Liberty-loving Americans have Locke, Montesquieu, Blackstone, and Adam Smith, while statist liberals have Marx, Hegel, and Darwin -- and, lest we forget, Saul Alinsky. Freedom-loving Americans embrace the Founders, while statist liberals have Wilson and FDR. A solid majority of Americans are lovers of liberty, however. It's they who must be rallied to the great cause of reclaiming lost freedoms and returning government to its proper limited role in a free society.

Contemporary liberals mustn't be permitted to get away with making claims on the Founders or founding principles. The narrative against liberalism must include arguments as to why liberals are deeply divorced from the founding principles that make America truly free. Knowledge is power, and the more Americans are equipped to make right choices at the ballot box and in their daily lives, the greater the chances of marginalizing that century-long deviancy called liberalism...(**Leftism**)
http://www.americanthinker.com/2010/07/delegitimizing_liberalism_1.html