PN-G bamatex

All things being equal, I would actually disagree with you, hippy. However, all things are not equal.   In an ideal world, the police are a civilian force, not a military one, designed to keep the peace, not protect the country. In an ideal world, they should be armed and equipped as such. In an ideal world, giving the police access to military equipment would lead to abuse. And this has happened before. About a week and a half ago, I toured the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute, located across the street from the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church where four little girls were killed in a bombing carried out by white supremacists in 1963. On display in that institute is an armored vehicle left over from World War II, two of which were purchased by the Birmingham Police Department in military surplus auctions and both of which were used to forcefully suppress peaceful civil rights demonstrations during the social turbulence of the 1960s. That was the doing the infamous Bull Connor - the epitome of a tyrannical elected official who abused his power. That is one of the many examples of why, in an ideal world, local elected officials who administrate a civilian police force shouldn't have access to military grade equipment.   The problem is, we don't live in an ideal world.   The fact that we live in a world where the threats of terrorism, urban violence and protests gone amok is not, however, a good reason to give local police access to military equipment on its own. We have mechanisms in place by which federal authorities who have proper access to military equipment can counter such threats when necessary. A prime example of this is the LA riot following the Rodney King verdict in 1992. When a massive portion of Los Angeles had to be cordoned off and abandoned by LA police because it was consumed in such extreme violence that normal policing efforts were too dangerous and too ineffective, President Bush became the first (and so far the only) president to activate the insurrection clause of the Stafford Act, which gave him the authority to deploy 3,500 active duty military personnel to Los Angeles to restore order. In an ideal world, this would be the pattern for handling a severe threat as you describe, and any time riots such as those in Los Angeles broke out, the president would step in and take this exact action at the exact point it becomes necessary.   That brings us to the second problem: we now live in a world where the national political consequences of something as simple and routine as restoring order are such that no president is willing to do so, rendering that mechanism effectively meaningless.   Consider New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina in 2005. The Stafford Act places constraints on what the president is capable of doing in response to a natural disaster. It gives primary administrative authority over relief efforts to state governors, whom it also requires to have a natural disaster relief plan in place in case of an emergency, to formally request federal resources from the president should they be needed, and to request a full federalization of the emergency response if the situation has reached a point where the state is no longer capable of effectively administrating those efforts. This is why it took so long to get federal aid to any part of Louisiana afflicted by Hurricane Katrina, when it didn't take long to get those resources to Mississippi or Alabama, or to Texas a month later during the evacuation for Hurricane Rita, or to Florida when it was struck by four separate hurricanes in 2004. The governor of Louisiana at the time, Kathleen Blanco, did not follow her disaster relief plan, did not properly request federal resources, and outright refused to request a federalization of the response despite her abject failure to handle the situation, against the recommendations of her own staff, President Bush and New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin. When faced with the fact that Governor Blanco wouldn't cooperate, the number of people dying in New Orleans and the destruction which was being inflicted by looters and vagrants, President Bush considered circumventing Governor Blanco via the same insurrection clause his father had activated 13 years prior. He wrote about his eventual decision not to circumvent her and provide immediate relief in his memoir, Decision Points, where he admitted that he couldn't do so because of the controversy and potential litigation that would have ensnared his administration if he effectively declared an open rebellion in New Orleans, relieved a female, Democrat governor of a Deep South state from her duties and deployed active duty military personnel, even if 95% of what those personnel would have been doing was disaster relief and it would have meant getting assistance to people trapped in New Orleans a week sooner.   Fast forward to Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014. Regardless of the circumstances regarding the Michael Brown shooting, the fact is, Ferguson was wrapped in violence throughout the entire ordeal. Missouri Governor Jay Nixon, a Democrat, repeatedly deployed Missouri National Guard troops to Ferguson in largely unsuccessful attempts to restore order from the days after the shooting right through the grand jury announcement. Unlike New Orleans, the circumstances in this situation were much clearer - from a legal standpoint, Ferguson was much more clearly in a state of insurrection than New Orleans would have been. In fact, the situation in Ferguson was largely analogous to the situation in Los Angeles two decades earlier. Yet we didn't get any formal declaration of open insurrection, and no federal troops were deployed to the area to restore order. Why? To be fair, it's hard to say in this case since President Obama hasn't written a memoir of his presidency in which that decision is discussed. Conventional wisdom, however, tells us that the calculus was probably similar in nature to the the calculus President Bush was forced to use in New Orleans. If he's ever asked, President Obama would probably say that the thought of deploying federal troops to Ferguson never crossed his mind - that a military suppression of "mostly peaceful" protests with some light civil disorder would be entirely out of line. Everyone on this site with any common sense knows that statement would be a farce. The president knows just as well as anyone who's seen pictures from Ferguson in the aftermath of the riot that its scope and violence entirely necessitated a military presence - Governor Nixon wouldn't have deployed the National Guard to Ferguson so many times if it hadn't. The truth is that if President Obama had deployed military forces to Ferguson under that pretense, it would have been all over the national news for the rest of his presidency, and even though it would have been the right decision and anyone close to the situation would know that, the vast majority of the American public who would only ever see media clips of soldiers containing and arresting black protesters would view it as the act of a despot (a racist despot at that, if President Obama were white).   That is why we don't live in an ideal world. In an ideal world, the right decision gets made. In this world, the politically savvy decision gets made. Missouri's Governor Nixon was able to deploy the National Guard to Ferguson without political backlash because his voters, the citizens of Missouri, were all close enough to the situation to know its true severity and, thus, that it was the right decision to make. President Obama couldn't because most of the rest of the country wasn't paying close enough attention to Ferguson and all of the rest of the country was too far removed from Ferguson to understand that a decision like that was necessary. He would have suffered backlash for it, just the same as President Bush would have if he did so in New Orleans.   The reality of this new world we're trying to live in is that mass media has advanced to the point where it shapes public opinion almost entirely on its own. As a result of this and a convergence of several other factors (most notably higher levels of narcissism manifesting in the political leanings of my generation and historically low levels of trust in government), popular sovereignty's ability to constrain tyranny and abuse of power is itself being abused via the constraints it now places on things as fundamental as the rule of law.   Because of this, the only people to whom military force is acceptable as a means of restoring order in 99% of cases are going to be the people whose lives, families and homes are at stake when civil unrest breaks out. Federal force is no longer an appropriate means because the vast majority of the country isn't going to support it except in the most extreme cases. That leaves state and local forces to shoulder that responsibility on their own. If state and local forces now bear that responsibility alone, then they need to be equipped to do so. As a result, whatever my ideological reservations about this issue may be, I have to side with my pragmatic sense and say that it is appropriate for local and state authorities to have access to military equipment.

This was a crying shame.

  ... or maybe 73.   [Hidden Content]

You're hearing it here first, folks. If Jeb Bush wins, Mitt Romney will be Secretary of Commerce or Secretary of the Treasury. Mittens done made a deal.

  Don't remind me.  :D

  This is a political issue. You know every bit as well as I do that the low taxes and relaxed regulatory climate in Texas have just as much to do with our state's economic prosperity as our abundance of natural resources and global energy demand.   The state economy isn't going to bust wide open because the the price of oil dropped now like it did in the '80s. Our economy is much more diversified and much, much stronger now than it was then. The price of oil will slow our growth, but it won't stop it and it certainly won't reverse it. That's a testament to our state's leadership, and the economic sensibility of the political philosophy Texas has embraced.

  That's not what I said at all. I didn't say to win for the sake of winning, and I certainly didn't say not to cut. I said that we have to cut in a pragmatic fashion, and that you have to support someone willing to do that - not cut haphazardly and altogether - if you want to get someone who will make cuts at all.

  FIFY   As I said, George Washington more often embraced the federalist view than the anti-federalist view. He more often sided with the father of the federalists, Alexander Hamilton, than he did Thomas Jefferson, the father of the anti-federalists and the Founding Father who espoused views most closely aligned to yours. Don't mistake anti-federalism for a view held by all of the Founding Fathers. John Marshall, the first notable Chief Justice of the Supreme Court and one of the men who led the fight for the Constitution's ratification alongside James Madison, laid the bedrock for Congress's Commerce Clause power, which is arguably their most broad and influential one.   I can agree that the states are where most of the issues should be debated and resolved via legislation in principle. On issues of education, healthcare and others that are similar in nature, it seems logical to have state legislators be the ultimate power since each individual citizen finds stronger individual representation in smaller legislative districts than they do in large congressional districts, and because state legislators are, as a result, more easily held accountable to their constituents. That said, the bottom line is that for the last 80 years, that's not how things have operated. There is no effective way to take federally funded programs like Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security and so on, break them up, and hand them to the states. That kind of transition would be disastrous for the states at the administrative, regulatory and financial levels. You would bankrupt half the states in the country or more, and fracture massive portions of the federal government in the process. The fact is, whatever the principle of the matter may be, it just isn't practical. It is just as important to cut the budget sensibly as it is to cut the budget at all.   And most importantly, we're not going to get a winnable presidential candidate who says things like that. Governor Romney, as I recall, made those exact statements in his bid for president two years ago. Despite that highly conservative stance, he didn't win. The point of that article I wrote and the point that I'm trying to convey in these posts now is that we have to accept that in politics, principle has to be balanced with pragmatism if we're to have our core interests be served at all. That's why all this "true conservative" business just doesn't make sense.

  I agree that spending cuts are necessary as a matter of national life and death. The issue of whether education and public health are federal or state issues, however, is not, except where financial matters are concerned and solely where financial matters are concerned.   On the subject of the Founding Fathers' interpretations of the Constitution regarding the safeguards they implemented to protect against government gone wild, the earliest Supreme Court interpretations of the Constitution interpreted the Bill of Rights as limitations only on the federal government, not the state governments, and favored very broad interpretations of federal powers such as the Commerce Clause. It wasn't until the Fourteenth Amendment that things as basic as Freedom of Speech, Freedom of Religion and the Right to Bear Arms were incorporated as restrictions on the state powers as well. The Founding Fathers saw popular sovereignty as the strongest defense against a federal government that is too powerful, with the codified limits on federal power setting up the framework for public debate. This means that they felt public opinion should be the deciding factor on matters such as whether the federal government has gotten too big except in the most extreme cases, and I doubt public opinion would favor doing away with the Department of Education, Medicare or the rest. Additionally, George Washington himself sided with federalists more times than not, embracing a stronger national government and in particular a stronger executive branch. Therefore, it's hard for me to accept that things like the Department of Education, Medicare and so on are outright affronts to the Founding Fathers' views. I think it's reasonable to say that they would have felt these things better handled by the states (again, in principle, I feel the same way), but I don't think they would be horrified at the thought of the federal government becoming involved in them.

  One wouldn't see Reagan or Cruz seeking out those professors or speaking to SDS simply because they have that "R" beside their name. Just like one wouldn't find Hillary Clinton speaking at a tea party rally.   Your most substantive evidence so far is the hiring of Van Jones. That's still not much.

  "The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States...."   See that general welfare part? I've got news for you: no modern day Supreme Court justice - not even Justice Scalia - is ever going to accept an interpretation of the US Constitution in which "general welfare" is not construed broadly enough to allow for spending on a public health or education issue. The justices provide "extreme deference" (there's a reason that's in quotation marks) to the legislature on that matter. Trust me. I've read more majority opinions than I can count.   I can agree, on principle, that public health is an issue best left to the states. That doesn't change the fact that Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security, for better or worse, are federal programs. They've been around for sixty years and they're not going anywhere. Whatever the principled approach may be, the practical one is to accept the reality that none of those programs will ever be broken up and handed to the states, and that conservatives will just have to do the best they can with what they've got.   Where education is concerned, the situation is similar. Obviously, it's not quite as drastic given that the federal government, even with NCLB, is nowhere near as involved in education as they are in public health, and that states have exercised much firmer control over education issues than public health issues throughout our history, but the fact of the matter is that DOE isn't going away. We might as well get something for the money.

  W. spent money like a drunken sailor?   Bush 43's average deficits were roughly half of Obama's average deficits. Most of Bush's deficits stemmed from unfunded liabilities in the form of preexisting programs that came due when the baby boom generation started hitting the right ages (i.e., Medicare, Social Security, etc.). In fact, in that regard, Bush saved us some money; I can't imagine what we'd be spending on Medicare had we not reformed Part C to force the private health care providers to get competitive. The only spending that is truly a result of the Bush administration is the spending on Homeland Security and the War on Terrorism, which was a fraction of the deficit and an absolute necessity following 9/11.   That brings us to the Patriot Act, in which case I'll say your assertion is just flat out wrong. There's plenty in that bill that's conservative. In fact, I think it's fair to say that was an extremely conservative security bill passed with overwhelming support in the hysteria and paranoia following 9/11. Are there parts of it that I don't agree with? Absolutely. There are parts of it that I think are an outright affront to our core liberty interests. I nonetheless look at it as a highly defensive bill passed by a highly defensive nation in the wake of the worst attack on American soil in US history - in essence, that it was a natural result of the circumstances. In any case, that's beside the point, which is simply this: while the Patriot Act may have gone too far, it's no secret that strong national defense is a core value for conservatives, and the Patriot Act went a long way toward shoring up that defense.

  Medicare Modernization pushed Medicare along the path to greater privatization. I don't see how that can be painted as anything other than a preexisting program taken in a conservative direction.   The only thing that NCLB really did was attach strings to preexisting federal funding. That's liberal in the sense that the federal government played an augmented role in a sphere that had traditionally been under the purview of the states. It's conservative in the sense that it made sure our tax dollars weren't going to keep funding mediocrity. Either way, education has a proven economic benefit, so at best, it's politically neutral.

  Alright, smitty, seriously, you posted a scanned in poster of Obama talking to SDS while he was running for the Illinois Senate. That's no more proof that he's a socialist than Steve Scalise's speaking to the KKK is proof that he's a bona fide racist. Unless you can produce something he's actually said or done indicating that he has, in fact, taken a socialist action, or at least that he intends to, your assertion is very poorly founded.

  I'm conflicted about whether or not to take that as a compliment.   I was looking for some kind of rebuttal to the argument presented in that article. Thus far, I have yet to hear one. For all these claims of "we need a true conservative" and "we haven't had a true conservative since Reagan" and "a true conservative would win these elections easily," I have yet to see the proof, and a lot of evidence supporting the contrary.   In the first place, we have had true conservatives since Reagan. Calling anyone in the Bush family anything less than a true conservative is a farce and an insult; the only arguably moderate things ever done in either Bush presidential administration were a tax hike done as part of a budget deal (that's called negotiation, and it used to be a necessary part of life in Washington) and TARP (which was, in my opinion, the government cleaning up a mess it spent three decades making, calling into question it's "non-conservative" nature). If you want to tally conservative actions versus non-conservative actions by either Bush while in office, the fact is the first column would vastly outweigh the second. In state politics, both Jeb and W. were conservative governors who represented their constituencies well while still managing to get bipartisan deals done.   Further, we've had plenty of "true conservatives" in the Republican presidential primaries. For the sake of argument, I'll remove Mitt and McCain from consideration. That leaves the likes of Newt Gingrich, Rick Santorum, Mike Huckabee, and Michelle Bachmann, all of whom had considerable tea party support at various points during their campaigns. Now let me ask you, if they couldn't even win the Republican primaries in a primary system that strongly favors rural states during election cycles where the tea party was a much stronger force then it is now, what makes you think they could win a general election?   The bottom line is, just like I said in that article, this "true conservative" rationale is self-defeating and dangerous to both the Republican Party and the long-term interests of this country. It is irrational, and frankly mathematically stupid, to immediately dismiss someone you agree with on 70% of the issues or more because of that 30% or less you disagree about, and effectively hand an election to a candidate you agree with 10% of the time or less. That is not an effective way to run a party, to win an election or to get anything done in Washington. And that sort of uncompromising, unforgiving mentality is why this party is in the tough spot it's in when it comes to the country's only nationwide election, not some lack of "true conservatives."

The way I see it right now, Chris Christie won't run. I think Bridgegate proves he has skeletons in his closet and he's scared they'll come out in a presidential campaign. I think his best shot is to angle for a cabinet appointment, and he's positioning himself to do that pretty well.   Since he's already mentioned here, Scott Walker is my dark horse candidate.

  A lot, but not all. Our corporate, technology and pharmacy sectors are growing by leaps and bounds with all these companies moving in. And, like the article points out, oil isn't our only major natural resource. Logging has shown a lot of promise as well.

  You didn't read the article, did you?

  I definitely don't agree with that. I could go into why, but it's easier to just post this:   [Hidden Content]

  I don't agree with that either. There are rumors coming from party insiders about a much more strongly controlled primary process in 2016. We may see no more than four candidates in the primary (Bush, Romney, Huckabee and Paul are the four I'm thinking will be in it right now) and a primary season that's over early in the summer. It looks like the Republican leadership is making the same adjustments the Democrats made in 1972.

  That's not necessarily true. You're correct in stating that the Republicans can write off the black vote; that's as solidly Democrat as solidly Democrat gets. The Democrats will likely win the black vote by a less substantial margin than they did in '08 and '12 simply because the Obama nomination pushed their margin of victory to extremely high levels even by their normal standards, but they'll still win it overwhelmingly. Where the real question lies in regards to the black vote is whether it will turn out in the record-setting numbers of '08 and '12. '14 suggests it won't, but that was just a mid-term election. Only time will tell.   As for the young vote, female vote and Hispanic vote, all of them may be more heavily contested than conventional wisdom would suggest.   The Bush family is very popular with Hispanics - Bush 43 won substantially higher portions of the Hispanic vote in both his gubernatorial and presidential bids than Republican candidates normally do. This is doubly true for his brother, Jeb, who speaks Spanish fluently, studied abroad in Mexico, and is married to a woman from Mexico, with whom he's had three children. If Jeb wins the nomination, the smart pick for his VP position is Susana Martinez, an Hispanic female currently serving as New Mexico's highly popular Republican governor. That would give the Republicans substantial appeal to the Hispanic vote and a good chance of winning two swing states (New Mexico and Florida, where Jeb was probably the most popular governor in recent years).   The female vote is never as significantly locked up as Democrats like to think. The truth is, when you subdivide the female vote into other categories, Republicans carried the married female vote by a significant margin. If a Bush-Martinez ticket can pull significant portions of the Hispanic vote, they may just pull enough of the Hispanic female vote to thoroughly contest the overall female vote the Democrats will be trying to capture with Clinton, which is her biggest appeal.   The youth vote is honestly up for grabs. It never turns out as solidly for the Democrats at the end of a Democrat presidency as it does at the end of a Republican one. Not to mention that the economy has been harshest to young people. If we look at '14 (which, again, was just a mid-term election), the youth vote may be close to an even split. If we factor in the Hispanic vote again (the disparity between the old and young turnouts in the white vote is flipped when it comes to Hispanics; the Hispanic young turn out in much higher numbers than the Hispanic old), the Democrats may be in for a shock.   Of course, a lot can happen in two years. A lot of things have to go right for the Republicans for anything I just said to come true. But, the point of this post is, things aren't as assured for the Democrats as you make them out to be.

[Hidden Content]

[Hidden Content]   Interesting chart. Not sure I agree with the rationale behind the reporter rankings - that's clearly a highly subjective measure.   I would be interested in seeing the number of public officials convicted on corruption charges versus the number of public officials overall in each state. That would probably be the most objective and substantive figure, but I bet the data would be incredibly hard to assemble.

  FIFY

  While I agree that it's in the party's best interest to start courting Hispanics, I don't think this will hurt that much. It doesn't really change anything. It's not like anybody didn't expect them to do this.   Now if they were smart, they'd pair it with an immigration reform proposal of their own. That turns a bill that doesn't gain or lose them anything into a bill that gains them something. The Democrats want to run with this narrative that the Republicans are anti-immigration and implicitly anti-Hispanic, and they want to use bills like this to support it. If the Republicans had paired a bill killing the amnesty order with legislation to streamline the immigration process, Obama's left with a hard choice. He either signs the legislation and gets the Republican version of immigration reform, or he vetoes it and the Republicans get to point it out from now until 2016 - "Who was really against reform in the end?" counters the Democrat narrative pretty effectively. Either way, it's a win-win. But this is what's so unfortunately typical of the party leadership. Shoot first, think about it later.