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Well a lot has happened since my last post on this blog so I will be updating tonight and the next few days so that my reader(s) don't think I have started go go soft.)
April 29,2009
Run Tom Run
Monday was a big day in American Politics, the U.S.Senate just became filibuster proof. The Democratic majority was just increased by 1 to 60, well it will be 60 once Al Franken of Minnesota finished "Finding" all of the votes in that contested race. This means that there will be no checks on the Democrats as they push there agenda over the next two years. Who might you ask did the Democrats gain? Well they gained a seasoned Senate Veteran, thats right Senator Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania switched from the GOP to the Democratic party, stating that the party had tacked decidedly to the political right over the last 29 years. Now this puzzeled me as a student of history and especially political history I find this answer to be dishonest as Specter first ran for the U.S.Senate in 1980, on the top of the Republican ticket that year was a man named Ronald Reagan, one of the most conservative Presidents in the last seventy-five years, the GOP has been dominated by Conservatives since the late 1970's whenever we have nominated moderates we have lost, Gerald Ford 1976, Bob Dole 1996, and John McCain 2008 and Specter has always had a liberal to moderate voting record.
Yet now suddenly he seems to think that the conservative party that was conservative when he first ran is now to conservative. The reality of the situation is that Specter, who voted for the Presidents stimulus package which millions opposed is now facing real political heat from his parties base, let me put it in a way my Democratic Friends can understand, remember how you felt when Joe Lieberman came out on America's side in the war on terror and voted with the Bush administration on the war and supported the troops, remember how enraged you where at him and how you vowed his defeat in his reelection primary, well that is how conservative Republicans in Pennsylvania felt about Specter voting for the stimulus package, it was a betrayle, only difference between the two was one was a principaled stand that would make the world safer and the other was Washington business as ususal, however I digress.
So Specter flipped and became a Democrat, now he will run for reelection as a Democrat in an overwhelmingly Democratic state. He will ask Democrats who have been voting against him for 29 years ( although he has gotten a decent plurality of the Democratic vote in his last few campaigns) to now allow him to be their standard bearer, I think he will win the Primary easily. Now if he faces his former primary opponent he will win easily and go on to be another rubber stamp for the Obama Administration in the U.S.Senate. There must be a check to the power of the Democratic party, as of right now there is not. The White house is Democratic, the House is Democratic by a large majority and now the Senate is Filibuster proof and the media well it is a lap dog to this White house so in order to maintain some checks we must maintain at least 41 Republican Senators. To do that Pennsylvania must be competative I believe that the only candidate that the GOP could run with any chance of winning is former Governor Tom Ridge, he is moderate on social issues, conservative on Fiscal issues, a proven leader as a governor, and an able administrator as a cabinet secretary, he also has won three times state wide in that state is well respected and is only slighly hated by Democrats and can appeal to cross over voters, he also has been out of politics since 2005 which means that it is likely some logic has found its way back into his mind. So If I where advising the Pennsylvania GOP I would tell them to go to Tom Ridge with hat in hand and 20 million dollars and beg him to run for the Senate it is the only hope to maintain some sort of fire wall against the coming storm of Obama style Big Government. We shall see how things unfold in 2010, hopefully I can use the phrase Senator Ridge one day.
April 15, 2009
Today all around this great country of ours tens of thousands of Americans gathered to protest this governments massive deficit spending. Many of those involved where people of a conservative political bent, however it was not exclusive there where many liberals and democrats in the protest as well. One of the symbols of this movement was a tea bag, to symbolize the Boston tea party when American's protested the unfair taxes by Great Britian by throwing crates of tea bags into the Boston harbor. Now these protests where peaceful and for the most part respectable, many politicans showed up and countless real Americans took time out of there jobs to attend and even bring their children. These where not protests that blocked traffic, or harassed the families of fallen service men and women, or that threw rocks at police, they where simply Americans exercising their constitutional rights to free speech and to peaceably assemble and redress their Government of their greivences, and yet to listen to much of the mainstream media these protests where made up of nothing more then a bunch of feeble minded bigots who hate children and orphans, and are all simply grassroots Republicans, the media made fun of these protests while covering them sparingly, now allow me to remind you that this is the same group of people who sent camera crews out to cover nearly every anti-war protest, it was so bad that it seem anytime six members of code pink met within five hundred miles of each other MSNBC would dispatch a news truck to show the "Ground Swell" of support against the war. Yet when Americans meet on tax day to say to their government ENOUGH! STOP MORGAGING OUR CHILDRENS FUTURES that some how was insignificant.
While these Tea Party Protest did not have the numbers of the anti-war protest they where significant, for the fact that most of the people who where there where actually employed, not simply retired hippies and college students, these people had to take time off of actual jobs to attend these protest. Something to mull over for the MSM when they start to look down on Americans actually wanting a say in the running of there government.
