It’s easy for the left to stereotype conservatives as callous rich businessmen, Alex Keaton wannabes, or plain anti-worker. The truth is conservatives have five legitimate concerns with modern day labor unions.

1) Unions Tend Towards Tyranny

Thomas Jefferson fought to protect Virginians from being forced by the government to fund Churches. In the Virginia Act for Establishing Religious Freedom, Jefferson wrote, “to compel a man to furnish contributions of money for the propagation of opinions which he disbelieves, is sinful and tyrannical.”

Jefferson’s use of sinful and tyrannical fits well with what unions across the country do. The ideal situation for unions is to have a union shop where employees have to join the union in order to work, or at least pay union dues, which makes them involuntary contributors to causes they may not support.

The National Education Association, for example, gave over $13 million to left wing advocacy groups. The NEA took money from conservative teachers living in states where union membership wasn’t optional and gave the money to People for the American Way, the Rainbow-Push Coalition, Media Matters, and the Human Rights campaign.

Even with no specific religious or ideological objection, many workers want no part of a union, but find themselves compelled. Such was the case with a sixteen year-old part time grocery store clerk who realized that union membership would be of no benefit to her and was bullied by the Union and threatened with losing her job.

Unions in the 21st Century want to take away the rights of individuals to make their own decisions and to force them to join the Union. Nothing illustrates this more than the failed efforts for Card Check legislation, which would have eliminated the secret ballot in union certification elections and opened the door to more intimidation.

2) Union Corruption

The links between organized labor and organized crime are well documented. These links did not end with the disappearance of Jimmy Hoffa. In January, a grand jury handed down indictments against several union officials alleging mafia ties.

Beyond the Sopranos stuff, there remains a significant amounts of embezzlement unions. A Buffalo, New York Union President just entered a guilty plea this week. Another New York Union leader allegedly took her union for $42 million. In recent years, teachers Unions in Washington, Massachusetts, and Dade County, Florida have suffered major embezzlement scandals.

The sheer volume of union corruption is jaw-dropping. That alone should lead to a re-examination of public support for unions.

3) Encouraging Mediocrity and Shielding Bad Actors:

Unions are notorious for protecting the jobs of people who perform poorly or misbehave at work. Nowhere is this more evident than in New York’s public school system. Thanks to the lengthy process to dismiss incompetent and abusive teachers, “rubber rooms” are maintained in which more than 700 teachers sit around and get paid full salary for doing nothing at a cost of millions of dollars per year to the taxpayer.

Teachers unions also oppose merit pay plans, claiming whether students do well in class is entirely out of their control, when studies show teacher quality is the biggest determining factor in how much students learn.

Union attitudes towards achievement are a turn off to people who might otherwise consider the teaching profession. A world where the good teachers make as much as the bad teachers is not one which will attract the best quality workers.

4) Demands that Ruin Business

Unions have contributed to the bankruptcy of several great companies, including GM and Chrysler, as well as United Airlines. Public employees pensions have put many states, such as California, on the verge of bankruptcy. Unions often deem the survival of the business they work for as secondary to getting larger health and pay packages.

The biggest damage done to businesses by unions have involved pensions and retiree health plans, but Union demands have gone beyond that. Thanks to the UAW, while GM was struggling to survive, they had to continue to pay laid off workers for years in a “Job Bank,” where they drew full salary to watch television, play board games, and read.

There was a time when unions fought against legitimately poor working conditions and sweatshop wages. In the 21st Century, unions serve mainly to drive up the cost of doing business in America and send jobs overseas.

5) The Opponents of Reform

Want to make government work more efficiently and do a better job providing services? The unions will be opposed. Powerful public employees’ unions pour massive amounts of money into campaigns and lobbying to kill efforts to reduce and reform government.

This is particularly noteworthy in education, where teachers don’t want any hard reforms passed. The unions are such diehards on opposing reform, they twice booed the President for proposing even the most meager changes to increase educational performance.

The constant opposition of teacher’s unions killed D.C.’s opportunity scholarships, taking educational opportunity away from more than 200 schoolchildren. Across the country, many students remain trapped in schools where they will never achieve their full potential, or remain on never-ending waiting lists to get into Charter schools for one reason and one reason only.

The teacher’s unions want it that way.

One famous teacher’s union president once declared, “When schoolchildren start paying union dues, that’s when I’ll start representing the interests of schoolchildren.” Opposition to school choice highlights this point.

The good news for conservatives this Labor Day is that the tide has begun to turn. As union membership declines and union excesses become more notorious, Americans are becoming less favorable in their views towards unions. However, conservatives have a long way to go to counteract the negative impact Unions have on our country.

Sunday morning religion wasn’t limited to churches this past week. NBC’s David Gregory spent the last third of his interview with GOP Presidential Candidate Michele Bachmann asking about her personal views on such issues as God’s guidance, her interpretation of biblical passages on husband-wife relations, and her personal views on homosexuality.

Bachmann isn’t the only candidate with religious views that have come under media fire. Mitt Romney’s Mormonism has been under constant media fire. Jacob Weisberg of Slate has suggested Romney’s Mormonism should disqualify him as have some fringe evangelicals. Governor Rick Perry’s religious faith has been similarly under scrutiny.

Some have argued that if there is to be any overt religious involvement in politics, then all religious points are fair game, even if dealing with obscure credal issues or statements made in religious non-political events. Not only does this lead to focusing on issues that have nothing to do with governing, but it also encourages prejudice against people of faith running for public office. While Americans still believe in God, there is widespread ignorance around the particulars of religion. This ignorance makes it possible to turn a benign belief into something to fear or ridicule.

Religion has been part of American politics since the founding era. Yet, it hasn’t been the source of political contention that it is today. In fact, it helped unite Americans during the Revolutionary War. This wasn’t because Americans all agreed on religion. While America was not as diverse religiously as it is today, there were nearly a dozen religious backgrounds among the Founding Fathers, including groups such as Presbyterians, Catholics, Quakers, and Episcopalians: groups that had been at odds in the old world.

If the political discussion of God focused on inter-religious snark about the Catholic view of the Eucharist, the Calvinist belief in predestination, or the Quakers quiet sitting services, the result would have been such interreligious loathing that there would be no hope of accomplishing a revolution. Instead, the religious political dialogue of the Founding Fathers focused on three key points about God that helped unite Americans and give them the strength to fight the world’s most successful revolution.

Perhaps, we should take a page from their book.  Rather that looking into the minutiae of a candidate’s personal beliefs, we’d be well-advised to focus any discussion of religion on the candidate’s views on these same points.

1) God is the source of our rights

When the Declaration of Independence states that it is self-evident that we “are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness,” it declares God, rather than the state or the king is the source of rights.

The issue of rights being “God-given” is something that you will hear from conservatives quite a bit. It defines nearly every major debate, whether you’re talking about abortion, religious freedom, the second Amendment, economic policy, and personal liberty, the idea that drives many on the right is that the state cannot legitimately step over these boundaries.

Liberals prefer to view rights as more elastic. In a 2000 debate, Professor Alan Dershowitz rejected the idea of natural law, stating, “Rights are not self-evident. They’re not unalienable. They are subject to modification just like anything else.”  This view is consistent with the left’s belief in a living constitution that ends in the creation of new rights and the curtailment of old ones to fit the courts view of how society is changing.

This is a crucial issue that every candidate needs to address and their actions need to back up their words.

2) God Governs in Human Affairs

Benjamin Franklin, a deist, in pleading for prayers to be offered before meetings of the Constitutional Convention declared this at the Constitutional Convention in calling for prayer. The founders often spoke of Divine providence which in Washington’s words, “wisely orders the affairs of men.”  The Founders believed that God was at work in the world.
This is why they believed in prayer. It was not an exercise in showing religiosity to curry political, but they did so out of a genuine sense that God was active and willing to guide those who asked for his help. At the Constitutional Convention, they had studied the failures of every well-intentioned effort to set up free governments, leading Franklin to quote scripture in declaring, that without his concurring aid we shall succeed in this political building no better, than the Builders of Babel: We shall be divided by our little partial local interests; our projects will be confounded, and we ourselves shall become a reproach and bye word down to future ages.”

These ideas gave the founders a sense of humility. It made them understand the limitation of their own wisdom to make rules for the lives of others, and is at the core of why self-government is so important in our system of government.

3) God is Just

The founders didn’t believe that God was neutral in human affairs. They believed that he stood on the side of justice. Even the irreligious Thomas Paine wrote, “I have as little superstition in me as any man living, but my secret opinion has ever been, and still is, that God Almighty will not give up a people to military destruction, or leave them unsupportedly to perish, who have so earnestly and so repeatedly sought to avoid the calamities of war, by every decent method which wisdom could invent.  “

However God’s justice was a two-edged sword and many founders realized that there would be consequences if America acted unjustly. On slavery, Jefferson wrote, “I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just; that his justice cannot sleep forever.” Lincoln later acknowledged the Civil War as part of God’s justice in his second inaugural, quoting scripture to declare, “The judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.”

A belief in a just God should cause leaders to be just themselves in the way they treat others and to ensure justice is done, knowing that they will called to give an account.

Beyond these simple but profound truths, their remains a whole universe of religious issues that while very important in a theological sense, have no relevance to the public sphere. While it may matter a great deal what a church believes regarding worship styles or if they believe in dietary restrictions, these questions have little relevance to public policy.

And citizens shouldn’t expect answers. It is irrelevant whether a candidate believes you are living in sin, or doesn’t believe that you will enter Heaven, as long as they don’t believe in using government to force you to go to Heaven. It is only the mind of an insecure person that looks to politicians to answer on these sort of issues. For example, what Mitt Romney thinks will happen to me in the afterlife is completely irrelevant as he has no vote on it.  

Let’s debate other issues of religious import within the appropriate forums, but when it comes to our nation’s political life, let’s stick to basics that made our nation free.

“So, what type of food should we have for an intervention?”

My wife Adrienne blinked at me. “Andrew, I don’t think anyone’s going to want to eat.”

I shrugged. “These things always make me hungry. It’s stressful.”

“I know it is, but we need to talk to Uncle.”

The doorbell chimed. I walked to the dark blue door and opened it. My middle aged cousin and his Asian-American wife stood outside. Both were dressed in their Sunday best: an old gray suit for Fred Merkel and a white silk skirt suit for Akima.

Fred craned his neck. “Is Uncle here yet?”

I shook my head. “No, JT and Maria will be bringing him here on the pretext of discussing another loan.”

Fred and Akima came in and sat on one end of our cat-scratched corner couch. Fred’s glance darted around the room and settled on the empty end table. “Hey, you got anything to eat?”

Akima elbowed Fred.

I beamed at Adrienne. “I told you so.”

She glared at me. “We’re not here to eat. We’re talking about Uncle’s life here. We’re talking about our family’s future.”

Fred sighed. “It’s so uncomfortable.”

Akima touched her husband’s wrist. “He needs it, though. We need to get everything out in the open, and then he can get help.”

“Sure, but what good will it do?”

“Come on, guys.” Adrienne extended her hands. “It’s got work.” She whirled to me, a hand on her fleshy, succulent hip. “Andrew, you’ve got to take a bigger part in this. You know what’s going on.”

The doorbell rang. I answered it. My younger adopted brother wore his African-American hair in dreds, an earring in his left ear, black jeans, and a black hoodie. JT glanced over his shoulder. “Maria will be in with Uncle in just a second.” He plopped on the couch diagonally across from Akima. “Hey, you got any Cheetos?”

My wife rolled her eyes at me. I raised my hands. “I didn’t say anything.”

Maria entered in a green, red and white traditional Spanish peasant dress. She scooted in next to JT. Her dainty form gave plenty of space between her and Akima.

Uncle sauntered in, ducking to fit his rotund, seven-foot frame through our doorway. Red, white, and blue striped pants, a matching top hat, a blue coat, and a white dress shirt about to burst its buttons spangled the obese, white-haired old man. I pointed to the tweed chair in the center of a room. “Have a seat.”

He settled in his chair, facing the couch. Adrienne and I squeezed into the corner space between Akima and Fred and JT and Maria.

Uncle smiled wide. “Children, it’s good to see you. I wasn’t expecting to see so many.”

I swallowed. “Uncle, we all love you. We’re thankful for the free land you’ve given us to live on. We’re more than willing to help you pay for security and that sort of thing.”

“Glad to hear it.”

“However, you have a problem.”

Uncle laughed. “Me? I don’t have any problems. I’m the world’s greatest uncle.”

“You’ve run up a huge debt.”

He frowned. “I need more money, or the bank will foreclose on my property, including the homes I’ve so generously given you. All I ask is that you ungrateful swine pay for my property taxes, mortgages, service fees, utilities, and my other costs of living.”

Lord, help me not to be taken in by this leech’s lies. “Uncle, it’s not that you don’t have enough money. It’s that you’re spending too much.”

JT leaned forward. “Yeah, man. You spend all that money bailin’ out folks, payin’ off cronies, and tryin’ to take care of everybody.”

Uncle Sam pressed up out of my chair and shook his fist. “Do you heartless people want me to throw the old people out in the streets? To not write Fred’s veteran’s benefit checks? Quite frankly, I’m surprised at you ingrates. Look at you.” He glared at my wife and me. “I helped pay for your education, guaranteed your loans, and supported you when you lost your jobs.” He whirled to JT and Maria. “I bought your families’ groceries when you were children, and paid for your educations, too.” He shot a glance at Fred. “I provide you a monthly income, free medical care, and I paid for college.”

Fred growled and tapped his metal leg with his cane. “Pardon me, but I believe I earned some of that, thank you.”

Uncle’s lips curled into a snarl of a smile as he settled back into his chair, his hands spread out wide in a welcoming gesture. “Of course, I want to give it to you.” Uncle glowered at me. “But this ingrate is threatening to force me to take it away.”

I shook my head. “You’re getting defensive and attacking us rather than dealing with the problem. It’s not a matter of whether you’ve helped us in the past.” I glanced sideways at Fred. “Nor is trying to turn us against each other going to stop this.”

Akima clenched her teeth “Uncle, you’ve been playing these manipulative games my whole life. I’m tired of it. You seek to divide our family into the “white side” and the “black side” the “rich side” and the “poor side.” You play divide and conquer with us so you can get more money and power. I’ve been a fool, but we’re not fools any longer.”

Uncle Sam leaned back. “Perhaps you don’t understand all that I do. I run charities that provide for millions of poor people in our own country and around the world. I help people go to college. I pay for your own children’s K-12 education.”

“You do not!” Maria held her thumb and forefinger about half an inch apart. “You provide that much money towards our children’s education and you use that to control it. I’m tired of having to answer to your bureaucrats for how I run my school.”

“I’m ensuring they get a proper education.”

She growled. “All you’re doing is getting in my way.”

I nodded. “And your help for college hasn’t been much help at all. All the money you’ve been spending has only been driving up the cost of tuition. Schools charge us more because of your reputation for deep pockets.”

Adrienne twirled her turquoise beaded necklace. “I’ve heard a lot of the money you give to help the poor in foreign countries ends up in the hands of criminals and thugs.”

Uncle scowled and shook his fist. “Lies, all lies! You’re not looking at the good things I do and mean to do, if you’ll give me more money.”

Akima snorted. “Your good intentions end up wasting money.”

Uncle raised his hands. “Okay, I admit, there’s been some waste. I’m working on it. An unbiased committee from my board of trustees is investigating it.”

I raised an eyebrow. “Uncle, didn’t you have an unbiased committee look into it before? Haven’t you had several unbiased committees investigate?”

“What are you saying?”

I cupped my hands together. “It seems to me that appointing an unbiased committee is your way of avoiding an issue rather than trying to solve it. When was the last time you actually listened to what one of these commissions said?”

Uncle stared at me, his lips parted.

Maria extended a hand to him “Uncle, nobody is perfect. We’ve let you do what you want because you do a lot of good, but we’re getting concerned about your spending.”

JT furrowed his brow. “Man, you’ve been running up a trillion and a half dollars on your credit cards every year. That’s more than I’d make in 10,000 lifetimes. My kids are being born $100,000 in debt because you can’t control your spending.”

My wife nodded. “It’s not just about you, Uncle. It’s hurting others around you.”

“What about your retirement funds?” Uncle whirled to Fred. “If those heartless, ungodly people don’t start giving me more money, I’ll be forced to stop your trust fund payments. You’ve paid into your trust fund all of your life.”

Fred shook his head. “I used to buy your garbage, but I found out the truth. There’s a word for what you’ve done with our trust funds: Embezzlement. You took my money and everybody else’s, spent if for other things, and left us a stack of IOUs. If you weren’t investigating yourself on such charges, you’d be in prison with Bernie Madoff.”

“But I’m Uncle. I needed the money.”

“That’s every embezzler’s excuse. If all I’ve got in my trust fund is a stack of IOUs, that is your fault, not my cousin’s fault. The world’s changed since you set up our retirement trust funds. The plan doesn’t work anymore. We need a new one.”

Uncle stamped his foot. “No, the current plan works fine! I just need these ungrateful swine to give me more money!”

I shook my head. “Your current plan takes the money I put into my trust fund and distributes it to those already receiving payments. Even if you don’t misappropriate a single dime, we’ll soon have more folk receiving payments from their trust fund than we’ll have folk making payments into their trust funds.”

Maria frowned. “And you want us to have even fewer children!”

I nodded. “The math has changed, so the plan has to change. People our age have to save for own retirements. We’re not going to rely on you to support us.”

Uncle gasped and pressed a fist into his corpulent side. “What, I’m not good enough? You’re fools to risk your money. Don’t you remember the stock market crash?”

JT rolled his eyes and laughed. “Man, you’re pathetic. You want folk to owe you so you got a hold on them. You can’t stand nobody who you don’t got a hold on.”

Uncle’s face flushed fire engine red. “Don’t you dare psychoanalyze me!” He glanced around the room, scowling. “What do you think you’re going to do?”

I bit my lip. “We’re not taking out any more credit cards for you.”

Uncle laughed. “You’re joking.”

We stared at him, our arms all folded across our chests.

A tremor rattled Uncle’s gargantuan body. “You have to be joking.”

I shook my head. “No joke.”

The color fled from his face. “You can’t! Our interest rates will sky rocket. The banks will foreclose on us. People wouldn’t get their trust fund checks. Our bond rating will be downgraded.”

JT leaned in. “You’re playin’ chicken little again.”

Fred nodded. “Yeah, I got taken in by you with the insolvent banks and the bankrupt car companies you bought. I’m not buying that again.”

I drew a deep breath. “Uncle, we’re just trying to bring you to your senses. We know it would be very difficult if you had cut by forty percent immediately, and we’d be willing to help, but you’d have to reform. First thing, you’ve got to start cutting back on the money you’re spending now.”

My wife added, “And you’ve got to limit the money you’re going to spend in the future.”

JT glanced at me and then at Uncle. “Then you have to balance your budget like the rest of us, and I’m not talking a one time deal. Put it in the family bylaws.”

Uncle crisscrossed his hands repeatedly. “No way will I be limited by the laws of stupid math to not spend more than I take in. However, I can patiently offer you swine a most generous compromise. If you’ll agree to give me more money, say $1 trillion, I’ll agree to cut spending by $2 trillion over the next ten years.”

I smirked. “Give me a break. You played this game during the Reagan Administration and in the 1990s. It never works. You get more money, which makes your spending deficit temporarily lower, and you make a few tiny cuts in the first couple of years. By the time year five comes around, you’ve forgotten all about your side of the deal.”

JT raised a hand towards Uncle. “Man, I think you missed the point. Your problem isn’t that you don’t have enough money. It’s that you spend too much.”

Uncle leaped up, shaking both fists. “I’m fine! You’re the ones with the problem! You’re all so selfish! You don’t want to give your poor uncle a little extra money. Now you’re going to let me have anymore new credit cards. That’s my only means of support, with the measly $2 trillion you ungrateful, bratty kids give your generous, benevolent uncle to live on. You all are the worst family in the world!”

He stormed out the door. I ran after him and screamed after his backside, “Uncle, you can run, but eventually you’re going to go bankrupt! You can’t go on like this forever!”

Shaking my head, I walked back in. “Well, that went well.”

My wife stood and squeezed my shoulder. “You did the best you can. Sometimes, these interventions are rough.”

JT sighed. “I bet he’s gone to find some other fools to adopt and get to support his hide.”

My wife frowned. “Let’s hope not. It’ll just enable poor Uncle Sam.”

The problem with these stories of the horror, woe, and doom of 1995? They’re not true.

In the 1996 elections, Congressional Republicans lost nine house seats, but picked up two senate seats. The Republican losses in the Houses were to be expected after the landslide 1994. Any time a party has a national wave, here will be districts that the party wins that they can’t possibly maintain as well as members who lack the political skills and judgment to be elected without the aide of political tsunami in their party’s favor.

Then there’s the argument raised by Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) that the 1995 Government shutdown “helped” Bill Clinton get re-elected. This is a quaint idea that disregards the role that nation performance plays in American presidential elections. When voters decide on a President, they ask questions about how the country is doing.

Looking back to 1996, what reason did swing voters have to throw President Clinton out of office? The economy was doing well with the dot com boom serving as a political windfall for the President and unemployment was moving down. President Clinton had struck a grand bargain to reform Welfare and at the same time raise the minimum wage, fulfilling a key campaign promise that wouldn’t have been possible if Democrats had kept control of Congress. The deficit was smaller than when Clinton took office with a growing GDP. Outside of Clinton’s early misstep in Somalia, the U.S. was in a relative state of peace with only peacekeeping deployments to a few trouble spots. He’d even joined social conservatives in support for the Defense of Marriage Act.

Conservative activists had plenty against President Clinton including his appointments, his stance on social issues and gun control, esoteric scandals that the electorate either didn’t understand or didn’t care about, and the fact that he had raised taxes on those making more than $127,000 per year. None of this resonated with the American people or provided the high burden of proof that voters demand to remove an incumbent President, particularly in good economic times.

With President Obama, many of these situations are reversed. Unemployment is higher than when the President took office and the economy is stagnating. Rather that shrinking deficits, the President offers us a future with trillion dollar deficits as far as the eye can see. Unlike Clinton, Obama has no unfulfilled moderate impulses that can be parlayed into a major popular policy achievement with the Republican House. All he has to credit is a highly unpopular health care bill that was cobbled together in the last Congress and led to electoral disaster for his own party.

Are there lessons to be drawn from the period? Sure, but not the doom and gloom being concocted by pundits and DC politician.

In the first place, Republicans in 1995 lost the PR battle. Some of this was personality driven with Newt Gingrich’s complaints about his Air Force One seating on a trip to a state funeral. But there was also a policy articulation problem. That the event is referred to universally as “the Republicans shutting down the government,” shows how badly the GOP mismanaged its communications. Technically, the GOP didn’t shut down the government. President Clinton did. He vetoed a continuing resolution that would have kept the government running and force changes that would lead to a balanced budget in seven years. The GOP ought to have been on the air with ads slamming the President for shutting down the government and touting the Republican Majority as doing what it promised to do in reigning in fiscal profligacy. Instead, there was none of that. President Clinton and the media got to define what had happened, so they won the debate. Republicans need to be prepared for a PR war as the debt ceiling deadline looms.

The second lesson is the danger of timidity. Then-Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole the government shutdown by passing a continuing resolution that met President Clinton’s demands. The Republican Revolution of 1994 was effectively over. The GOP determined to go along to get along and became the party of earmarks, big spending, and the preservation of political power. The new boss became the old boss.  In 2005, then-House Majority Leader Tom Delay (R-Tx) best exemplified this new establishment attitude when he declared the budget had been “pared down pretty good.”

They maintained their majority for eleven more years but they failed to address the serious fiscal issues with entitlements that were always there, other than making them worse by expanding into Medicare Part D. The Republicans failed to advance any Conservative health care plan that could have headed off Obamacare-style reform. The Republicans failed to reform the U.S. Tax Code. Tentative attempts were made at some of these items, but under media fire, the GOP always wilted as retreat seemed to be easier than explaining their program to the American people.

The GOP Majority of 1996-2006’s timidity in the face of big issues played large role in creating the crisis we’re in right now. In this debt ceiling debate, one cannot help but hear echoes of that wasted Congressional decade in nervous voices of those who warn about the dangers of the 1995 government shutdown. If America’s fiscal problems are going to be addressed, the GOP needs to act in the spirit of the old Latin proverb, “Fortune Favors the Bold” rather than the GOP motto of recent years when facing tough issues, “Duck and Cover.”

The reason Obama is calling for tax increases is not because it is strictly mathematically necessary to raise taxes in order to reduce the debt. We have a spending problem and there is money to be found that while a bit more difficult to obtain, is still available. The reasons are a two edged political sword:

1)  It would comfort his own political base against whatever  cosmetic little spending cuts that are spread out over 10 or 20 years get into a reduction package.

2) It would absolutely decimate Republicans. They ran on not raising taxes and if they raise taxes or pass some phony deal on the debt ceiling, the Republican Party will be sowing the wind and set to reap the whirlwind. For many Republican and Tea Party voters, the Republican victory last fall was not a matter of love of the Pachyderm. Rather, Republicans are double probation and voters on not afraid to give up on them. Voters expect promises to be kept or else.

The President’s posture in these negotiations has been bad faith. He has asked Republicans to take steps that would be politically devastating and might even split the Republican Party. No cut discussed has been of that magnitude.

If you want Republicans to talk tax increases, take serious steps on Social Security and Medicare that will stop that $44 trillion avalanche, get rid of a couple cabinet departments. Slay a couple of federal sacred cows. We’re not seeing that from the President.

As an aside, I have to comment on the cynicism of our political system. If a candidates breaks their campaign promises to get things done, they are maligned as a flip flopper and a liar. If they honor their campaign promises, they are called intransigent partisans. This is why most candidate for high political office are either sociopaths or people of extreme patriotism who can put up with this sort of nonsense.

The 51st state should be named South California, says Jeff Stone, a Republican on the the Riverside County Board of Supervisors. But the proposed 13 southern California counties that would split off from the Golden State would not include Los Angeles.

Stone told the Times’ Phil Willon that the ommission is intentional and is part of a plan that would make for a new conservative Californian state.

I like the idea and it makes good sense. California is just too darn big and culturally dominated by the big cities of San Francisco and Los Angeles.   Of course there are political reasons why I like this and that’s why it’ll never happen.

First, it would like add 2 GOP Senate Seats. Second, it would probably cost the Democrats 20 electoral votes or thereabouts and South California can’t secede from California on it’s own initiative. There have only been two attempts to break up states that have been successful. In 1820, Maine gained approval from the Massachusetts Legislature to secede after two decades of fighting. In 1863, West Virginia was created for the portion of the Virginia that remained loyal to the union during the Civil War. Of course, there was partitioning of states out of territories. For example, there was a healthy debate over whether the Dakotas would be one state or two.

So, unfortunately South California is a pipe dream, but what a nice pipe dream it is.

Memo to the press: Stop it!  The story’s over. He’s resigned and is out of public life. He’s trying to salvage his marriage. Leave them alone. The ethics of someone who would snap these pictures and sell them are deplorable, even worse is a professional news organization that would print these.

The mainstream media complained during Sarah Palin’s bus tour that she was treating them like paparazzi rather than representatives of the mainstream press. Sorry, but it’s getting hard to tell the difference these days.

Later today, the Senate will hold a vote to end the filibuster against Goodwin Liu, President Obama’s nominee to the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals. In 2005, when a handful of President Bush’s nominees faced filibusters, at least 12 current U.S. senators said that preventing judicial nominees from getting up-or-down votes isn’t just wrong: it’s unconstitutional.The impending cloture vote on the Liu nomination will be an important test to separate those senators who stand on principle from those who put politics above all else.

Yes, and Democrats who were claiming the filibuster was essential even for judicial nominees, began backing “filibuster reform” when this essential began cramping their style in getting the President’s agenda passed. What exactly is their point?

Besides, they could make an argument that

During his umpteenth day in a row bashing Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich, MSNBC’s Chris Matthews began a lengthy segment Thursday by referencing the famous Marx Brother line “Who you gonna believe – me or your own eyes?”

Problem is the high and mighty “Hardball” host, despite playing a clip from “Duck Soup” clearly identifying the distinctive voice and accent of the speaker, gave credit to the wrong brother

Yes, Chris Matthews is guilty of misidentifying Chico Marx as Grocho Marx.  An intellectual crime to be sure. Watching the clip though. Although, it’s clear that the voice is Chico’s, Chico was dressed up as Groucho. It’s completely possible that Matthew knew what the line was, saw it delivered, but didn’t actually hear it. He only saw somebody dressed as Groucho delivering the line.

This is the type of silly junk that ends up on blogs that turns people off towards politics. It’s irrelevant nonsense that leads to information overload because too many are taking time to communicate to many things that don’t matter at all.

At the start of the year, most of us thought, “The Debt Ceiling will have to be raised or the country will go into default.”

Frosh Senator Pat Toomey (R-Pa) shook the world by saying, “Not really,” in a series of editorials that shook up the D.C. establishment, Toomey pointed out that the treasury had more than enough revenue to pay the interest on the debt and to meet 3/4 of Government spending. The Treasury Secretary is the one who gets to make the call as to what bills get paid if the government can’t take on any more debt. If the U.S. defaults, it will be the decision of Tim Geithner to pay for PBS rather than paying for the debt.

Showing the vigorous intellectual discipline of the left, they responded by giving people who believe this, a derogatory name, “Default Deniers.” Which, I guess compares us to Holocaust deniers. They point out that even if we don’t default, failing to extend the debt ceiling could have some negative consequences:

Even if Treasury pays its debt, other obligations, such as salaries, tax refunds and contractor payments, would go unmet, tattering the country’s creditworthiness, Geithner has argued.

Toomey and others are quite aware of the risk:

It would be more like a partial government shutdown, Toomey said.

“That’s disruptive; that’s not optimal,” Toomey conceded in an interview. “But it’s not a financial crisis. It’s not a default on our debt. It’s not a catastrophe. It’s a disruption.”

A partial government shut down is an apt description of what Geithner is talking about and we’ve had full government shut downs that have gone on for weeks without wrecking the country.

As Toomey said, “It’s not ideal.” Even most of us who want to see government drastically reduced wouldn’t want to see the massive immediate cuts that would result from stopping the debt ceiling. Gradual reductions will allow adjustments from states and the private sectors.

 The truth is they’ll be even worse long term consequences if the ceiling is raised again and again. If that happens, defeault is inevitable. The burden of debt is growing at such a rate that the next generation will be crushed beneath the heals of the ruling class’ self-indulgence and petty politics. This is a fact that the Democrats in the Senate and President Obama deny and will not engage in any serious discussion to right the ship because any serious plan will have to deal with entitlements, and they’ve made their living scaring  the aged, that they can’t walk back.

The Democrats tactic right now shows how seriously they take this crisis, as their plan seems to involve playing chicken. Harry Reid has no plan to offer cuts to increase the debt ceiling. He’s betting on John Boehner blinking.

At this point, public opinion is running against raising the debt ceiling 47-19%, so if Republicans hold firm, Democrats face a choice as to whether they’ll craft serious legislation to curtail spending or continuing living in denial about what the welfare state hath wrought.

As many grass-roots Republicans remain in search of a conservative candidate with the pizazz to go toe-to-toe against President Obama, a man from deep in the heart of Texas who was tea party before the tea party was cool appears to be giving the presidential race some thought.

Gov. Rick Perry has insisted on multiple occasions that he has no interest in the presidency, but RCP has learned that political associates have begun to nose around quietly on Perry’s behalf.

A Texas pol who is close to Perry has been telling a few key strategists that the nation’s longest-serving governor sees a vacuum and is waiting to be summoned into the race. This source believes that could happen by late summer. Without fellow Southerners Haley Barbour or Mike Huckabee in the race — and with Newt Gingrich’s early troubles raising further doubts about the current lineup — there could be a glaring niche for Perry to fill.

I like Perry. He’s been very consistent in governing Texas according to conservative principles. Texas has remained well ahead of the rest of the country economically with no income tax, and small government.

To be honest, what I don’t like is his approach. “Wait to be summoned?” This sound Fred Thompsonesque. Huckabee could have afforded to wait until late Summer. Really, if Perry’s serious, he’s needs to start laying the groundwork quick and show some fire in the belly. Still, he would add quite a bit to the field. (Hat Tip: Hot Air.)

Irony #1: Maddow Assaults the videos as Historical revisionism and then tries to revise history.

She begins with a moving story of how Senator Joe McCarthy went after Communists in Hollywood, searching for anybody who might look like a Communist and ruined their lives sending people to prison and pointed out that Ronald Reagan testified as a friendly witness for Senator McCarthy’s Committee.

There’s a big problem with that. You see the committee Reagan testified beforewas the House Unamerican Activities Committee. Was Senator McCarthy on the HouseUnamerican Activities Committee?

Would Miss Maddow explain how Senator McCarthy who never served a day in the U.S. House had anything to do with the House UnAmerican Activities Committee?

Hello Maddow, whatever you think of McCarthy’s investigations, they had nothing to do with Hollywood.Ann Coulter put it best, “He was interested in commies working for the government.” Whatever the merits of McCarthy’s investigations, they had nothing to do with HUAC.

Irony #2: Ms. Maddow’s New and Improved and Past

She attacks conservatives for reimagining a new and improved past for America. She then re-imagines a history where there were no communists to be found in America and really the whole focus of anti-communism was just harassing a bunch of innocent actors. This is the left’s new and improved past.

There’s a problem It’s called t he Verona Papers that show yes, there were ties between the American Communist Party and the Soviet government.  Yes, there were Americans working as spies for the Soviet Union in the U.S. working for the government.

The truth during the Cold War is that: 1) There were some innocent people who got hurt or falsely accused during anti-communism investigations due to excessive, zeal, sloppiness, or ulterior motives on the part of some anti-communists and 2) there were spies for the Soviet Union who weren’t caught or were blindly defended thanks to those liberals who would rather pretend  they didn’t.

And yes, there were Communists in Hollywood, but not everyone accused was guilty.

Irony #3: Ultimate Edition or Maddow becomes What She Protests

Rachel Maddow complained how Senator McCarthy (mystically transported across Capitol Hill) presided over a House Committee that harassed the entertainment industry,  had friends selling each other out, and ruined careers.

Less than a minute later, she then expressed frustration that the people who produced the history videos in question wouldn’t give her the names of the animators responsible and asked anyone who happened to know who drew them to let her know.

So in other words, she’s saying if your friend drew these cartoons, you need to report them to me.

The, once she gets that information, she can announce their names the air and they’ll find themselves unable to get a Hollywood job, thus leading to ruined careers.

To complete the irony, she could bring them on the show and ask tough questions such as, “Have you now or ever been a right winger?”