partisan politics

The conservatives attending this week's Conservative Political Action Conference are generally hawkish when it comes to foreign policy, but they applauded Rep. Ron Paul (R-TX) on Friday when he told them the US has no choice but to get out of Iraq.

"Part of the reasons why we lost this last election was the foreign policy issue," Paul insisted. "Generally speaking, the presidential candidate who argues the case for less war-mongering will win the election."

Paul noted that George Bush ran in 2000 on a pledge to end Bill Clinton's nation-building, but then he "joined the idea that the American taxpayers -- you -- have an obligation to take care of everybody and police the world."

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"So yeah," Paul acknowledged. "We want to get rid of a bad guy in Iraq -- we did. But ... another one million Iraqis got killed. Believe me, they weren't all terrorists. ... But nevertheless, it pleased Osama bin Laden."

Really, the war on terror is too expensive? We shouldn't have invaded Iraq because they had no WMDs? Christ, it took you this long to figure it out? Oh and Osama is still running around his mountain cave home laughing at us? And we've managed to give millions of people around the world some pretty legit reasons for hating us?

Way to go, the last eight years have been a complete waste of time.

IN 1993, Rush Limbaugh was invited to address CPAC, but had to take a pass. "I wasn't able to broom my schedule and get down there," he told the audience of his short-lived television show on February 22nd, 1993. Mr Limbaugh did, however, send a reporter to ask attendees a question.

Rush Limbaugh has challenged the Democratic National Committee a million dollars that [President Bill] Clinton's economic plan will not work if it's implemented. Do you think that's a good bet?

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Mr Clinton presided over eight years of economic growth.

Funny thing, my entire family (mom's side, but my dad was joining them) were all talking this weekend about how bad Obama is handling the economy and how he was going to screw everything up. Oddly, no one could tell me how things got this bad.

February 19th: Rick Santelli, live on CNBC, standing in the middle of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, launches into an attack on the just-announced $300 billion slated to stem rate of home foreclosures: “The government is promoting bad behavior! Do we really want to subsidize the losers’ mortgages?! This is America! We're thinking of having a Chicago tea party in July, all you capitalists who want to come down to Lake Michigan, I'm gonna start organizing."

Almost immediately, the clip and the unlikely "Chicago tea party" quote buried in the middle of the segment, zoomed across a well-worn path to headline fame in the Republican echo chamber, including red-alert headlines on Drudge.

Within hours of Santelli's rant, a website called ChicagoTeaParty.com sprang to life. Essentially inactive until that day, it now featured a YouTube video of Santelli’s “tea party” rant and billed itself as the official home of the Chicago Tea Party. The domain was registered in August, 2008.

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ChicagoTeaParty.com was just one part of a larger network of Republican sleeper-cell-blogs set up over the course of the past few months, all of them tied to a shady rightwing advocacy group coincidentally named the “Sam Adams Alliance,” whose backers have until now been kept hidden from public. Cached google records that we discovered show that the Sam Adams Alliance took pains to scrub its deep links to the Koch family money as well as the fake-grassroots “tea party” protests going on today. All of these roads ultimately lead back to a more notorious rightwing advocacy group, FreedomWorks, a powerful PR organization headed by former Republican House Majority leader Dick Armey and funded by Koch money.

On Wednesday afternoon, the House had just voted, 412 to 0, to pass H. Res. 1113, "Celebrating the role of mothers in the United States and supporting the goals and ideals of Mother's Day," when Rep. Todd Tiahrt (R-Kan.), rose in protest.

"Mr. Speaker, I move to reconsider the vote," he announced.

Rep. Kathy Castor (D-Fla.), who has two young daughters, moved to table Tiahrt's request, setting up a revote. This time, 178 Republicans cast their votes against mothers.

It has long been the custom to compare a popular piece of legislation to motherhood and apple pie. Evidently, that is no longer the standard. Worse, Republicans are now confronted with a John Kerry-esque predicament: They actually voted for motherhood before they voted against it.

Republicans, unhappy with the Democratic majority, have been using such procedural tactics as this all week to bring the House to a standstill, but the assault on mothers may have gone too far. House Minority Leader John Boehner, asked yesterday to explain why he and 177 of his colleagues switched their votes, answered: "Oh, we just wanted to make sure that everyone was on record in support of Mother's Day."

By voting against it?

If things like this aren't proof that our government is incompetent and incapable of doing the most basic things, let alone effectively governing, I don't know what is.

Three prominent financial executives faced questioning from a House committee on Friday about the huge paydays that they earned from the subprime mortgage boom, even as their companies have lost billions of dollars and thousands of borrowers have lost their homes.

The questioning mainly fell along party lines, with Republicans apologizing for hauling such distinguished corporate officials before the panel, and Democrats questioning everything from the income gap in America to the particular bonuses, stock sales and compensation the executives were awarded.

Two of the three lost their jobs last fall after the collapse of the subprime market -- E. Stanley O'Neal, Merrill Lynch's chairman and chief executive, and Charles O. Prince III, his counterpart at Citigroup -- but left with sizable pay packages. The other, Angelo R. Mozilo, the founder and chief executive of Countrywide Financial, presided over the demise of a once high-flying company that is now being acquired by Bank of America.

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"There seem to be two economic realities operating in our country today," Representative Henry A. Waxman, Democrat of California, the committee chairman, said as the hearing opened Friday morning. "Most Americans live in a world where economic security is precarious and there are real economic consequences for failure. But our nation's top executives seem to live by a different set of rules."

The question before the committee, he said, was this: "When companies fail to perform, should they give millions of dollars to their senior executives?"

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The hearing shed some light on how Wall Street's compensation philosophy may have contributed to the mortgage boom. Corporate boards and compensation committees agreed to lucrative bonus plans that gave their leaders strong incentives to take big risks. Executives aggressively pushed their companies into lucrative businesses, like underwriting subprime mortgages and packaging the loans into complex securities. Then, as the housing and credit markets plummeted, those profits turned into enormous losses for shareholders. Wall Street's top executives still kept their pay.

"With executive compensation you get what you pay for and you pay for what you get," Nell Minow, editor of the Corporate Library, an independent research firm specializing in corporate governance, said in testimony prepared for the hearing. "If you make compensation all upside and no downside, that will affect the executives assessment of risk. It will make it clear to him that he can easily offload the risk onto shareholders. It's heads they win, tails we lose."

Hillary Clinton and Obama each spent about $130,000 in Michigan while Obama spent $1.3 million in Florida--more than any other Democratic candidate and more than eight Republican candidates, who were eligible to win delegates from the state.

Yes, it seems clear the Florida playing field was NOT level. Obama outspent Clinton in Florida. Let the rationalizations begin.

Now compare that to someone who decides they want to run for president that isn't independently wealthy.

When we started RedState in May of 2004, we used a website program called Scoop — the same program a lot of similar sites on the left used. But, as the number of visitors to our site grew, Scoop kept crashing on us.

If we’d been a liberal website, we would have been able to fix the problem quickly and relatively cheaply. The online left loves Scoop. Unfortunately, there weren’t really any conservative Scoop developers out there to help us. We kept crashing and were out of money. We had to close down or take drastic action.

Well, we didn’t close down. We ditched Scoop and moved to the best alternative at the time, a program called Drupal. But, in accomplishing the switch, budget constraints forced us to sacrifice some popular site features in order to alleviate the strain on our overused servers.

It's no secret that the more educated one is, usually the more left of center (whatever that is) one leans. It also isn't surprising that geeks who choose to spend their time on open source software also tend to lean left.

What is surprising is that Redstate can't find any help, especially considering there is a forum specifically for paid Drupal help.

But I hate even more to imagine what America will be like if someone like Hillary Clinton or Barack Hussein Obama wins the presidency in November. RedState can help prevent that nightmare from coming true – but only if we’re offering the best possible web experience to the widest possible audience.

You've got to be kidding me.

FLIP aims to decide the 2008 presidential election based on the results of the final game of the 2008 World Series. If the total score of the two teams in the final game is an odd number, FLIPpers vote for the Democrat. If the total is even, FLIPpers vote Republican.

Interesting, but I don't think this is going to go anywhere.

On Friday, the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, James Sensenbrenner, was unhappy with the testimony being presented so he decided to gavel the meeting to an end and walk out with several other Republicans in tow. The Democrats present had their microphones silenced and began to raise their voices. The Senate Democratic leader, Nancy Pelosi, is seeking an apology :

As House Democratic Leader, I expect all Members to be treated by the majority with dignity and respect. I will ask Speaker Hastert to order Mr. Sensenbrenner to apologize for his behavior to the witnesses at the hearing today, and to promise that this will never again happen.

First, Representative Sensenbrenner was way out of line. Grow up. Second, ordering an apology? What the hell is this? Representative Sensenbrenner is not sorry, and any apology out of him, ordered or not, is worthless. A promise that something like this won't happen again will mean nothing. I hate partisan politics.

What's funny is some people are calling the Deomcrats infantile. What, and turning the microphones off, calling the meeting over and storming out isn't? Pot, kettle, black.