28 May 2006 @ 4:08PM >> I’m generally not fond of linking to press releases from politicians, but I thought this list of items in the immigration bill recently passed by the U.S. Senate was pretty interesting. My favorites:

Under the bill, illegal aliens get an option to only have to pay three of their last five years in back taxes. Law-abiding American citizens do not have the option to pay some of their taxes. [...]

[E]mployers of aliens applying for adjustment of status “shall not be subject to civil and criminal tax liability relating directly to the employment of such alien.” Businesses that hired illegal workers would now get off scott-free from paying the taxes that they owe the government.

Only having to pay taxes for only 3 out of every 5 years you work? Hey, I’d love a deal like that!

The folks who raise hell any time a tax cut is proposed seem remarkably silent on this. I guess they only like taxes when the money comes out of the pockets of legal Americans and companies that don’t break our immigration laws. I wonder if there are any other laws I could break to get my tax bill cut by 40%.

But what’s happened to the Republican Party? While 32 Republicans voted against the bill, 20 voted to pass it. A significant bloc of Senate Republicans clearly found this bill palatable.

Democrats can be expected to vote for such things; indeed, only four Democrats voted against it. But during campaign seasons, Republicans are usually the ones who claim to oppose placing undue burdens on law-abiding taxpayers. Are they afraid of being called racists? Or are they hoping that when today’s illegals become citizens in the future, the Panderpublicans will end up with that vote?

For years, I’ve heard people on the left complain that there is really only one party in Washington, it just operates under two names. I’m beginning to see what they mean.

19 May 2006 @ 9:02AM >> Yesterday, the Senate voted 63-34 to adopt English as the “national language” of the United States. The move, which doesn’t call for any changes in the way government business is conducted, was largely symbolic. Nevertheless, the Associated Press reports that a top Democrat threw down the race card to denounce the measure:

Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid of Nevada [said,] “I really believe this amendment is racist.”

I’ve written before about the danger posed by hate speech laws. Harry Reid is yet more proof. If declaring English the national language of the United States is racist, then speaking out in favor of it could be considered hate speech.

What if the United States had a hate speech law? What if Harry Reid were the Democratic Senate Majority Leader instead of the Minority Leader? And what if someone who shared Reid’s view occupied the White House? An in-power political coalition could conceivably use hate speech laws to criminally prosecute its opposition.

As far-fetched as that might sound, it’s already happening on college campuses. And even though college campuses tend to be rather extreme when compared to your average American town, there are many municipalities that are similarly extreme: San Francisco, Berkeley, Seattle, Ann Arbor, Portland, etc.

There is a movement brewing for local hate speech laws. And you can expect them to be used just as speech codes are on college campuses: as a club with which to beat political enemies into submission.

26 April 2006 @ 9:58AM >> When it came to the economy, there used to be two distinct political parties in America. Democrats generally favored larger government, more controls over the economy, and higher taxes. Republicans preferred smaller government, a more free economy, and lower taxes. But in the dozen years since the Republicans gained control over Congress, they have inexplicably begun to morph into the party that they displaced.

Government spending under the Republican Congress is out of control, and the high price of gas is causing Republicans to dust off socialist terminology like “price gouging” and “obscene profits.” The one remaining difference between the parties seems to be on tax policy—Republicans still tend to favor lower taxes—but given the Republicans’ abandonment of their other principles, I wonder how long that will be the case.

James K. Glassman chides President Bush for jumping on the “bash big oil” bandwagon:

He started his speech by, once again, criticizing Americans for their “addiction to oil.” He used the same obnoxious phrase in his State of the Union Address.

[...]

The President — and I am not even mentioning the claptrap one hears from Speaker Denny Hastert, Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist and Judiciary Chairman Arlen Specter — is now using the lexicon of extreme environmentalists and statists. Again, he knows better.

After talking about addiction, the President said he was going to crack down on price gouging — that old bugaboo. He said he had asked the Justice and Energy departments to find out whether the rising price of gas was partly the result of manipulation. This is absurd. The gasoline market is broad, fragmented and highly competitive. Price gouging has been studied many times, to no effect. Gas prices are rising because crude oil prices are rising.

[...]

President Bush lived and worked in the oil patch. He knows very well that oil is a commodity whose price moves up and down with global changes in supply and demand — movements that we can’t affect all that much. What we can do is remove political obstacles to a well-functioning market. Such steps would increase supply and lower prices. But we shouldn’t kid ourselves. The rising oil price is affected by geopolitical threats, but it is mainly the result of increased demand, which itself is the result of rising standards of living — which are a lot better than the alternative.

Glassman also explains many of the reasons that the price of gas is so high today: increased demand from developing countries like India and China, belligerent talk from Iran and general uncertainty on the world stage, and a political climate in America that makes it impossible to increase production capacity.

Did you know, for example, that a new oil refinery hasn’t been built in the United States in the past 30 years? Or that environmentalists have blocked new oil drilling virtually everywhere in the country? And since oil isn’t an option, what about nuclear power? Nope, environmentalists have blocked that, too. Even wind farms are out of vogue; the great environmentalist Kennedy clan is trying to kill a wind farm project in the Nantucket Sound that might have marred the view from their Hyannisport compound. In other words, many of the people using the high price of gas to push for government intervention in the economy are the very people who created the energy supply shortfall in the first place.

But that doesn’t let the Republicans off the hook. In fact, it makes it more important to take them to task for their irresponsible economic rhetoric. I expect Democrats to employ socialist arguments; it’s what they do. But when Republicans join them, it makes me wonder what the point of voting Republican is. I doubt I’m alone in feeling this way, and if so, the Republicans have a reason to worry about the election in November. They are supposed to be the party that understands basic economic laws like supply and demand. Maybe a good old-fashioned electoral ass-whoopin’ is what the Republicans need to remind them of that.

18 February 2006 @ 12:20PM >> This seems reasonable to me:

Two U.S. Democratic senators said on Friday they would introduce legislation aimed at blocking Dubai Ports World from buying a company that operates several U.S. shipping ports because of security concerns.

Robert Menendez of New Jersey and Hillary Clinton of New York said they would offer a measure to ban companies owned or controlled by foreign governments from acquiring U.S. port operations.

“We wouldn’t turn the border patrol or the customs service over to a foreign government, and we can’t afford to turn our ports over to one either,” Menendez said in a statement. The Senate Banking Committee also plans to hold a hearing on the issue later this month.

P&O, the company Dubai Ports World plans to buy for $6.8 billion, is already foreign-owned, by the British, but the concern is that the purchaser is backed by the United Arab Emirates government.

The UAE company would gain control over the management of major U.S. ports in New York and New Jersey, Baltimore, Philadelphia, New Orleans and Miami and that has sparked national security concerns among lawmakers.

9 January 2006 @ 1:35PM >> The Republicans campaigned to bring their philosophy of limited government to Washington and pledged to clean House, literally. And they did, for a while, but over time, certain principles seemed to disappear. (Whatever happened to the idea of term limits? Oh yeah, bad for incumbents, so let’s forget about that.) Now that the Republican Party has controlled Congress for over a decade, it seems that they have morphed from the party of limited government into the party of, simply, government. More >>

7 April 2005 @ 8:55AM >> Turns out the mystery Schiavo memo came from a staffer of Republican Senator Mel Martinez. The staffer has resigned, as he should have, not only for his putrid politicization of the issue, but also because, according to some of the drafts I’ve seen online, he is an atrocious speller.

Still, as PowerLine points out, the news of the memo’s source does not absolve the media of charges that it reported the story erroneously. For example, Washington Post referred to the memo being “distributed to Republican senators by party leaders.” A staffer of a man who has not even been Senator for a quarter year does not a “party leader” make.

Meanwhile, Jonah Goldberg quotes Senator Martinez denying knowledge of the memo prior to it being made public:

[Chris Wallace, Fox News]: Senator, how do you explain, then, these talking points, which have been circulated among Republican senators? And let’s put them up on the screen, so our viewers can see them.

[...]

Martinez: And I reject those. I’ve never seen them before today. And I’ll tell you, they’re not a part of what I think this case is about.

It may be possible that Senator Martinez’s staffer passed around a memo that he himself never saw. But is it likely? Looks like Mel’s got some splainin’ to do.

As with the much else in the Schiavo case, nobody seems to come out of this looking good.

28 March 2005 >> In The Weekly Standard, Fred Barnes reports on the latest Republican-bashing mystery memo promoted by the establishment press:

Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist never saw it. Neither did the Senate Republican whip, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky. The number three Republican in the Senate, Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania, didn’t get a copy. Nor did the senator with the closest relationship with President Bush, Judd Gregg of New Hampshire. And the senator with the familiar Republican last name, Elizabeth Dole of North Carolina, didn’t see it or read it. The same is true of Senator Mel Martinez, the rookie Republican from Florida.

Yet the infamous memo that argued Republicans stood to gain politically by saving the life of Terri Schiavo was characterized by ABC News as consisting of “GOP Talking Points.” True, a few paragraphs were of Republican origin. They had been lifted, word for word, from a Martinez press release outlining the provisions of his legislative proposal, “The Incapacitated Person’s Legal Protection Act.” This was the inoffensive part of the memo. The offensive part—it didn’t come from Martinez—left the strong impression that Republicans are callous and cynical in their attempt to save Schiavo’s life, ill-motivated in the extreme.

Despite the fact that nobody could authenticate the memo or determine its source, both ABC News and The Washington Post described it using language that implied it came from the Republican Party itself:

Supposedly the memo was distributed only to Republicans on the Senate floor. Ergo, it was a Republican document. ABC correspondent Linda Douglass first reported its existence on March 18, saying the network “has obtained talking points circulated among Republican senators, explaining why they should vote to intervene in the Schiavo case.” She mentioned the two offensive passages, and the memo was shown on the screen. The ABC website was explicit about the source of the memo: These were “GOP talking points on Terri Schiavo.” Two days later, the Washington Post referred to it as “an unsigned one-page memo, distributed to Republican senators.”

There wasn’t a hint in these reports the memo could have any other source but Republicans. Yet there was no evidence it had come from Republicans. It was unsigned and had no letterhead or date. Nothing indicated it came from the Republican leadership or the House or Senate campaign committee or from the Republican National Committee or even from a stray Republican staffer.

[...]

How did ABC and others get wind of the memo in the first place? It came from “Democratic aides,” according to the New York Times, who “said it had been distributed to Senate Republicans.” Not exactly a disinterested source.

How curious that such sloppy reporting just so happens to work against Republicans yet again. But it gives the Republicans an opportunity to strike back: simply author an “incriminating” but unsigned memo with no letterhead, get some GOP staffers to pass it out, claiming that it came from Democrats, and wait for the establishment media to report the “story.” Think you might be waiting a long time? Then I guess you understand the game by now.

Update: The memo’s author has come forward.

16 March 2005 @ 1:13PM >> Consider this: 18 of the 19 hijackers on September 11th carried multiple driver’s licenses from states with lenient licensing laws. These days, driver’s licenses are effectively used as legal identification, enabling things like opening bank accounts and checking into hotels. Of course, they’re also used to verify the identity of passengers as they board planes.

How much easier did we make the terrorists’ mission that cloudless Tuesday morning by handing them driver’s licenses? We may never know, but one thing is certain: more stringent licensing laws could have denied them the legal documentation they used as they plotted their attack and boarded our planes. It is remarkable that 3 1/2 years later, nothing has been done about this critical national security issue.

The Coalition for a Secure Driver’s License is working to change that. Through a new ad campaign, the coalition is working to inform the public about the gaping hole in our nation’s defenses left by the insecure licensing laws of some states. The House of Representatives has already passed legislation to tighten licensing laws, and a similar bill is pending in the Senate.

This is a tremendously important issue. If you agree, you might want to let your Senator know.

10 November 2004 @ 6:44PM >> A debate is raging in the conservative community about Arlen Specter, the liberal Republican senator from Pennsylvania who is slated by seniority rules to become the next Senate Judiciary Chairman.

Some people worry that Senator Specter would block President Bush’s court nominees that take a strict constructionist view of the Constitution. If that’s the case, then having Specter be the committee’s gatekeeper would be little better than having a liberal Democrat. Recently, I received this e-mail from Douglas Urbanski, who told of a meeting he once had with the senator:

Arlen Specter personally told me that the number one thing he regretted was his questioning of Anita Hill and his vigorous support of Clarence Thomas. Let me repeat: Specter made it clear that he did not think much of Thomas, and, in our chat Specter did his best to distance himself from these events. For what it is worth, Specter also elaborated that he thought President Reagan was too fanatically conservative and regretted much of his support for President Reagan.

Specter thinks Ronald Reagan is a fanatical conservative? Draw your own conclusions.

8 April 2004 >> Condoleezza Rice’s testimony before the 9/11 Commission made for riveting listening. The political fireworks were on full display when the Democrats on the panel pressed Rice, asking why President Bush had not developed a pre-September 11th plan to preemptively attack Afghanistan and disrupt al Qaeda. These questions, of course, come from the same folks who criticize Bush administration for acting preemptively against Iraq.

The inconsistencies of the Democratic arguments against the Bush Administration make it impossible for them to put forth any alternate vision, because anything they propose will conflict with some of their previous criticisms. Even that they’ll deny, though; they’ll sweeten their waffles with the syrup of nuance, the word they use to cover up the fact that they’re holding several completely contradictory stances simultaneously.

According to principles of quantum mechanics, it is possible for a subatomic particle to occupy multiple positions at the same time. Perhaps the Democrats hope to become the quantum party. If so, it explains why John Kerry, the consummate Quantum Candidate, is the perfect person to head the Democratic ticket this fall. More >>

15 August 2003 >> A reader asks: “I was just wondering if there was anything about Bush you don’t like?” More >>

10 December 2002 >> “Regardless of whether Lott actually supports segregation—and I’m pretty sure he doesn’t—it is very difficult for excuse-makers to interpret his statement as being anything other than an endorsement of segregation. Instead of standing on feeble ground to defend the indefensible, they should stand aside, and let Lott receive the rebuke he deserves. For the good of the Republican Party, but more importantly, for the good of the country, Trent Lott should step down as the Republican leader in the Senate.” More >>

4 December 2002 >> “If you don’t share Tom Daschle’s view of the media, you’re a right-wing nut. If you characterize his blocking of legislation as obstructionist, Daschle will compare you to a mullah stirring the passions of terrorists. And Gore believes it is so unthinkable for the media to present conservative viewpoints that it must really be part of some grand conspiracy secretly funded by evil fascist billionaire capitalist pigs whose wallets are made out of people who died because they couldn’t find affordable prescription drugs.” More >>

21 November 2002 >> A reader responds to “A Dream Come True for Republicans?” More >>

21 November 2002 >> It doesn’t matter whether Pelosi actually pushes the Democrats in the House to the left, or whether the public merely perceives that she has; either way, the Democrats will suffer the damage in the voting booth. More >>

11 November 2002 >> “Nancy Pelosi fits right in with the liberal orthodoxy: she was the only Democratic leader in the House or Senate to vote against the Iraqi war authorization, she routinely casts reflexive votes against tax cuts, and she even opposed the Welfare Reform package backed by President Clinton that passed with substantial bi-partisan support. If Pelosi becomes the Democratic leader in the House, it’s a sign that liberal Democrats have prevailed over the centrists. That shift in power could spell doom for Democratic hopes in 2004.” More >>

21 May 2002 >> “We must try to understand how we mishandled intelligence prior to September 11th, but let’s do it in a calm, rational way, far away from professional politicians. Our goal should be fixing the problem, not affixing the blame. Forgive my skepticism, but judging from the hotheaded handwringing that has taken place already, holding hearings in some Congressional kangaroo court will do little more than provide a podium for people whose primary concern is their next election.” More >>

1 February 2002 >> “Democrats believe they have politics on their side, and they may be right. After all, there are many more non-rich than rich. Pandering to the non-rich by attacking the rich is as old as Karl Marx, and it certainly may get the Democrats some votes. But it won’t get the economy moving any faster. Injecting more capital into the markets will. And if it just so happens to make the rich a little richer, is that so bad if we all benefit?” More >>

11 January 2002 >> “Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle seems bent on becoming the Senate Minority Leader and destroying the chances his fellow Democrats have of retaking the House of Representatives this fall. While layoffs accumulate, while the unemployment rate climbs, and with the country mired in recession, Tom Daschle is selfishly playing with people’s lives so that he can provide his party with an ‘issue’ for the 2002 elections.” More >>