This week’s two prime examples of self-serving guns on the Right pointing inward? On the one hand, Kathleen Parker caricaturing and lambasting me and millions of evangelical Christians:
To be more specific, the evangelical, right-wing, oogedy-boogedy branch of the GOP is what ails the erstwhile conservative party and will continue to afflict and marginalize its constituents if reckoning doesn’t soon cometh.
Simply put: Armband religion is killing the Republican Party….
It isn’t that culture doesn’t matter. It does. But preaching to the choir produces no converts. And shifting demographics suggest that the Republican Party — and conservatism with it — eventually will die out unless religion is returned to the privacy of one’s heart where it belongs. [emphasis added]
In other words: Shut up, social conservatives. Note, Parker doesn’t encourage SoCons to develop and apply a healthy, humble perspective that distinguishes religious faith from political action. She says to suck it in, be quiet, and quit embarrassing her. It would appear that Parker has spent too much time lately at Beltway cocktail parties, and perhaps is getting ready to publish a new book.
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Last week I pondered in a Denver Post op-ed what the effect might be of the statehouse Democrats elevating pro-public school choice Rep. Terrance Carroll to Speaker of the House:
Carroll is set to appoint fellow Democrats to the House Education Committee. In recent years, the committee, largely stacked with handpicked union favorites, has killed or watered down many K-12 education bills deemed unacceptable by the union. CEA may lose some of its leverage to bottle up education reform in committee.
Well, yesterday came the revelation of the House Education Committee assignments. Michael Merrifield retains the chair, with Judy Solano as the vice-chair. Overall, the membership of the committee appears to move scarcely a whit in the direction of parental empowerment, choice, and accountability.
(And when I make that remark, I include the membership from both parties - Republican and Democrat. I’ll have to wait before passing judgment about a few of the newly-elected legislators on the committee. But I’d be glad to learn more about the positions of Randy Baumgardner, Carole Murray, and Mark Waller.)
It remains to be seen what progress the majority Democrats will make on education reform with this situation. What kind of leverage will the new Speaker, relatively free of union ties, be able to have with a House Education Committee that looks ready to reprise its role as the place where meaningful K-12 reform goes to die? It will be one of the more intriguing story lines of the coming legislative session.
If Republicans are interested in coming up with real education solutions, and want to talk intelligently and effectively about the issue, they’ll want to pay attention to this dynamic and how it develops. And of course, I hope my commentary will be of some value, too.
Via Face The State, judging by the plethora of applicants for Colorado’s Secretary of State job, perhaps I should have sent in a resume myself. I’ve never taught yoga, played lacrosse, or met Ross Perot, but what the heck? You can cast your own vote for which one of the 20 applicants is most deserving of Bill Ritter’s appointment as the next Secretary of State.
Too bad for you and me. We missed our chance at statewide office after yesterday’s deadline.
Are you up for a little distracting whimsy? A former elected official, Boulder attorney and self-proclaimed “former Republican” (one of the more popular descriptors being bandied about these days) offers this (over) dose of elitist smugness, painful self-indulgence, overwrought rhetoric, and selective historical knowledge:
I was a Republican for 28 years. Like so many others who now vote Democratic, I didn’t leave the party — it left me. Based on the analyses of this month’s election, it also left college graduates, suburbanites and Hispanics in the red-state dust. The sad fact is that a map of the few counties that voted more Republican than they did in 2004 neatly overlays maps showing the nation’s highest rates of obesity, poverty and lack of education — call it the Deliverance Belt — a sad state of affairs for the party of Abraham Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt.
As much as the Republican Party needs reform, it won’t happen. The far right chorus still bellows “We Shall Not Be Moved,” with solos by the three tenors: Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity and Bill O’Reilly.
Yes, the notoriously out-of-touch Limbaugh, Hannity, and O’Reilly (O’Reilly??) hold Security Council-like veto power over the Republican Party platform. So scrap the Party and move Left? Yeah, that’s the ticket.
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Breaking: The annual center-right blogger poll of “Least Favorite People on the Right” - brought to you by John Hawkins at Right Wing News - has been released. Each of the 46 center-right bloggers who participated submitted an unranked list of 12 nominees. The top 25 names - from “McCain staffers” to John McCain - have been released as part of the poll.
For the first time I was a participant in the poll. Of the 12 names I suggested, 11 appear in the top 25. Personally, I don’t consider a few of the other names to be “on the Right” - a loose designation, to be sure, and of necessity. Anyway, thought you may find the results interesting.
Lately I’ve struggled for the time and energy to put together some coherent thoughts about what the GOP needs to do to rebuild. Jim Manzi at The Corner said it almost perfectly for me. You need to read the whole post, but here is a key excerpt:
While it is always possible to imagine some arbitrary configuration of 51% of voters who have the label “conservative”, Rod’s point [ed: that "no conservative movement that hopes to be successful can do so without religious conservatives"] strikes me as correct as a practical matter. Further, more important than the question of electoral advantage, is the fact that tens of millions of citizens have deeply held beliefs that should be considered in making and enforcing the law.
I also believe it to be true that a political movement that proposes to impose what is traditionally considered to be a socially conservative agenda (e.g., a near-absolute restriction on abortion, preventing gay marriage, and so forth) on the entire population of the United States any time soon through force of federal law faces a pretty bleak future.
Both sides of these debates, I believe, have to recognize that many people who share the same country disagree in good faith, and are unlikely to be persuaded within our lifetimes. As I have argued at length, I think that the only workable compromise is not to try to force the creation of uniform national law when no national consensus on the morality of these issues exists. Instead, I believe that we should have an agenda of devolving as many of these social issues, as a matter of law, to as local a level as possible.
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When this morning I wrote “Any effort to rebuild Colorado’s Republican Party that’s done in a strictly top-down fashion is destined to failure”, I hadn’t yet seen Patrick Ruffini’s post “Change Won’t Come from the Top Down”. Great minds think alike? Remotely possible.
Anyway, if you share this point of view, and are a conservative interested in doing your part to help rebuild the GOP, may I recommend you sign up to join this site and get involved in the conversation.
Colorado soon will have a black Speaker of the House to go along with a black Senate President (Peter Groff). The Denver Post reports today that the Democratic caucus in the state house has thrown its support behind Denver’s Terrance Carroll to replace Andrew Romanoff in one of the state’s highest political positions.
Moving beyond race, Carroll is someone with whom I obviously have many political disagreements. However, on the issue of school choice that I care about deeply, he is as good as the Democratic caucus has to offer. I feel a little better about the hope for defending and advancing gains in educational freedom with him at the helm than with the alternatives. But we’ll remain diligent at our post.
In other news, Republicans in the state senate have unanimously rallied behind Josh Penry as minority leader. An excellent choice to be a shrewd and hard-fighting adversary, and most fitting that he hails from Colorado’s deep red Mesa County strength.
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It’s the morning after…
El Presidente has some amusing video reactions to last night’s election results.
Meanwhile, both Joshua Sharf (who ran a valiant race in an overwhelmingly Democratic district) and Rocky Mountain Right highlight the bright spots for Colorado conservatives.
I concur with their lists, but let me add one more small bright spot in Colorado. The State Board of Education lost GOP chairman Pam Suckla - a Bill Ritter apologist - and gained common-sense conservative Marcia Neal, giving an effective Board majority that the Colorado Education Association can’t be terribly happy with. Especially if Bob Schaffer is selected as the next chairman.
At the national level, the good news is that Republicans may have retained as many as 44 seats - sadly, though, one of those seats belongs to convicted Alaska political dinosaur Ted Stevens. Perhaps we could hope that Stevens will resign and a successor be appointed. But regardless, it appears at least there will be a center-right firewall against some of the more egregious overreaches. (Especially if Minnesota’s Norm Coleman retains his 572-vote lead over the farcical and embarrassing Al Franken.)
Congratulations to Barack Obama and the Democratic Party on their historic achievement. Though I wish the first black president had not been someone so far to the political Left, we should all be glad that this nation is not as hung up on race as some would have us believe. And thank God for the peaceful transition of power we have in the United States. But the loyal opposition remains to rebuild the GOP while fighting for the causes we believe in. The road map for Colorado success in 2010 is fairly clear, but the work to get there will be substantial.
As for this blog, the intensity of political posting will significantly decline during the coming of weeks. Tomorrow will appear the first in my daily series on things to be thankful for leading up to Thanksgiving.
Republicans in Colorado and nationally don’t have many bright spots to look forward to this Election Day (and conservatives have even fewer). But one silver lining that I hope for is the defeat of Pennsylvania Democrat Congressman John Murtha.
If you have a little cash you are willing to play with to help someone at the tail end of this campaign season, please consider helping Republican challenger Bill Russell (no, not this Bill Russell) as he fights to send Murtha to the retirement home. You can contribute here.
Update: Link added below
First, there was the real-life absurd “Godzilla” flyer created by Protect Colorado’s Future. Then the Denver Metro Young Republicans fired back with the “Kittens for Amendments 47, 49, and 54″ ad - famously featured in the sidebar of today’s Rocky Mountain News print edition Rocky Mountain News Stump blog.
To keep the spirit alive, here’s my own contribution to the cause:
*WARNING* Satire *WARNING* Satire *WARNING*
Face The State reports on the poster child for Amendment 47:
Ernest Duran, president of the United Food and Commercial Workers Local 7, paid himself and two of his children combined salaries of over $430,000 in 2007.
Duran collected a salary of $162,368 for 2007, according to records with the U.S. Department of Labor. Two of Duran’s children also work for the UFCW Local 7. His daughter Crisanta Duran, an associate counsel, pulled in $133,410 in 2007. His son, Ernie Duran, III, earned $134,378 in 2007 as an executive staffer. According to Salary.com, a Denver-area grocery cashier can earn about $24,377 annually, an assistant manager at the same store earns approximately $48,950, and a store manager earns about $66,800 a year.
The Durans’ salaries are funded by dues from the union’s 20,000 members. [Ben's note: And agency fee payers who never chose to join.] Members include Dominic Brazzale, 18, who graduated high school earlier this year and got a summer job working at the Safeway at 80th and Wadsworth. He worked there for about just over four months before quitting. Two months into the job, Brazzale’s boss approached him with a union contract and told him he had to sign. “My boss told me they take money from him, too and it sucks, but you have to sign it.”
Too bad Amendment 47, also known as Right-to-Work, looks to be doomed in the polls. It is, however, instructive to note that the Durans’ UFCW has pumped nearly $6 million into the anti-47 campaign - which has even used the money illegally to attack other ballot amendments, as well.
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Laughable quote of the day from Democrat state senator Brandon Shaffer, as reported in Politicker:
In state Senate District 19, Shaffer gave Democrat Evie Hudak the edge over Republican Libby Szabo, saying Szabo is “extraordinarily partisan.”
“Eventually, there’s enough of a base there, enough unaffiliated voters who are looking for more of a collaborative approach to getting things done across party lines, that they’ll come home to Evie,” Shaffer said.
More of a collaborative approach from Evie Hudak? The Evie Hudak who publicly stated “I support the entire Democratic party platform”? I guess one would have to be “extraordinarily partisan” himself to think that represents a “collaborative approach”.
Yes, I’m still laughing. Politicians in the course of their duty often say plenty of questionable truth value. But then sometimes one of them opens his mouth and blows the truth right out of the water. Brandon Shaffer dropped a real whopper.
Libby Szabo is in a tight race. Please help her out however you can.
The Rocky Mountain News reports on a complaint filed yesterday by Amendment 49 supporters:
Backers of Amendment 49, which would prohibit union dues from being deducted from public payrolls, have filed a complaint with the Colorado secretary of state alleging that an opposing group failed to disclose its intention to campaign against them.
Instead, Coloradans For Middle Class Relief states in its registration with the secretary of state that it would campaign against Amendment 47, according to the complaint by Jon Caldara, president of the Independence Institute and author of Amendment 49. But Caldara said Coloradans For Middle Class Relief has sent out fliers on other ballot measures as well, including Amendments 49 and 54.
The Denver Post has a similar story. Both merit a “no comment” from the group caught in violation of campaign finance laws.
Pictures of the Coloradans for Middle Class Relief flyers that illegally attack 49 and 54 can be seen here and here (back and front). In fact, you probably received one or both at your home.
The union lobbyist-funded committees have more money than they know what to do with. Between Protect Colorado’s Future and Coloradans for Middle Class Relief, more than $20 million has been raised to attack Amendment 49 (Ethical Standards) and two other initiatives.
With that kind of money, it’s quite easy for union lobbyists to flout the law and ask forgiveness later. They can’t afford to have Amendment 49 pass, which would mean giving up their free government collection service and put them on a level playing field with every other special interest group. Political power indeed corrupts.
In this case, the flagrant breaking of campaign laws simply points out the need for Ethical Standards. But by the time the truth can have a fair hearing, it may be too late.
The Rocky Mountain News today provides the most systematic deconstruction of the grossly misleading, multi-million dollar Protect Colorado’s Future campaign against 49:
There’s no obligation for political campaigns to be fair, let alone balanced, but there are times when messages go beyond the pale.
Case in point: the advertising, largely bankrolled by labor unions, to defeat Amendment 49, the “ethical standards” initiative.
- Muzzle workers and endanger public safety? “In what way? The amendment doesn’t say unions can’t collect dues. It just says government can’t collect dues for them.”
- Threaten public employees’ paychecks? “Nonsense.”
- Silence small business? “Bizarre.”
- Backed by multinational corporations? “What a joke.”
Or as Mike Rosen says about Protect Colorado’s Future, after listening to one of their over-the-top, ridiculous ads on his 850 KOA radio talk show: “They think you’re stupid. Don’t be stupid.”
