Liberty is not a pick and mix free-for-all in which you think government should ban the things you don’t like and encourage you things you do like: that’s how Libtards think. Libertarianism – and the Tea Party is nothing if its principles are not, at root, libertarian ones – is about recognising that having to put up with behaviour you don’t necessarily approve of is a far lesser evil than having the government messily and expensively intervene to regulate it.

And this isn’t an argument for anarchy. There are still plenty of ways society can make known its disapproval of certain “immoral” practices, such as through the traditional method of stigma. Libertarianism doesn’t mean doing what the hell you like and letting everyone else go hang themselves. It’s about doing whatever the hell you like so long as it doesn’t harm others. (Property rights, for example, would remain sacrosanct).

Maybe this technically isn’t directly from the Brits, but it is the Brit Samizdata blog quoting the American Richard Viguerie:

Some have asked how the Tea Party movement hopes to pressure Republican leaders or influence the party. That’s the wrong way to look at it. The goal is not to pressure Republican leaders but to become the Republican leaders. The goal is not to influence the party but to become the party.

That led to another Viguerie comment

“Voters have given Republicans one more chance to get it right,” Richard A. Viguerie said today. “They are on probation, and if they mess up again, they won’t get another chance.”

“The last time the Republicans were in charge, they became the party of big spending, Big Government, and Big Business. They abandoned the philosophy of Ronald Reagan and cozied up to lobbyists and special interests. And they paid a price at the polls.

“This year, the Democrats under President Obama and Speaker Pelosi drove millions of voters right back into the arms of the Republicans. But if Republicans return to their bad habits – if they start working for K Street instead of Main Street – they will pay a terrible price. Tea Party voters and conservatives will turn them out in the 2012 primaries.

“People will say: Fool me once, shame on me. Fool me twice, and the Republican Party is dead,” Viguerie said.

The Chief would add the observation that there was once a political party called the Federalists. A bit later in history there was one called the Whigs. Both died and went away. The Republicans are still able to profit from those examples.

Between those attacking Palin and Palin, I’m with Palin.
The Chief heartily concurs!

Liz Cheney Group Defends Itself Against Criticism by ConservativesRINOs

The conservative group led by Liz Cheney is having to defend itself against criticism from fellow conservatives Bushian RINOS who say that an ad attacking Attorney General Eric Holder is unfair.

Unfair? WTF?

The ad, launched by Keep America Safe, an advocacy group led by Cheney, criticizes Holder for not disclosing details about Justice Department lawyers who have previously defended alleged terrorists.

The video, which surfaced last week, brands the lawyers as the “Al Qaeda 7″ and ridicules the Justice Department as the “Department of Jihad.” The narrator questions, “Who are these government officials?…Whose values do they share?”

Based on their decisions, not an unreasonable question, but also not exactly politically correct.

Justice Department spokesman Matthew Miller has called it “offensive” that the patriotism of agency lawyers is questioned by Cheney’s group.

Doesn’t it say somewhere “By their fruits ye shall know them.”?

Another way of stating the issue is to note that If they walk like ducks, quack like ducks, then they’re ducks!”

Republicans Are Poised for Gains in Key Elections

Republicans appear positioned for strong results in three hard-fought elections Tuesday. But isolated, off-year contests aren’t always reliable indicators of what will happen in the wider federal and state races held in even-numbered years.

Democrats and Republicans are jostling to glean messages from voters in a race for a U.S. House seat in far northern New York, as well as from contests for governor in New Jersey and Virginia. Republicans, increasingly optimistic, say the contests foreshadow trouble for President Barack Obama and the Democratic Party’s ambitious agenda heading toward the 2010 congressional elections.

“We will be looking very closely at the results in these three races and reminding Democrats of the message they send about the agenda that they are forcing on American taxpayers,” said Paul Lindsay, a spokesman for the National Republican Congressional Committee, which coordinates GOP House races.

It’ll be very interesting to see how these votes turn out…especially NY-23, and New Jersey.

At the same time, there is this recent polling result, which should give the GOP party leaders some pause:

Partisan Trends
Democrats Inch Up in Partisan ID during October, GOP Slips

For the third straight month, the number of Americans identifying themselves as Democrats inched up while the number of Republicans fell slightly.

Hmmm. On the eve of some potentially significant GOP gains, this other trend seems at first glance to be a bit contradictory.

Obviously something else is at work here….

What NY-23 Says About The GOP And Its Voters

THIS is interesting…it provides an local example that helps explain both of the above reports.

The race in New York’s 23rd Congressional District highlights the concerns many Republican voters have about their party leaders.

At a time when 73% of Republicans believe their party’s representatives in Congress have lost touch with the GOP base, 11 county leaders in upstate New York picked a nominee for Congress who supported the Democratic president’s stimulus package, his health care reform plan and “card check” legislation designed to make union organizing easier. All three items are overwhelmingly opposed by Republican voters – and even by Republicans in Congress.

The decision by county GOP leaders to nominate such a candidate seemed almost designed to provoke the party’s core voters, and it did.

A Conservative Party candidate, Doug Hoffman, entered the fray and picked up endorsements from many leading national Republicans.

Newt Gingrich, on the other hand, urged voters to stick with the party’s official nominee. He said a decision by local party leaders was good enough for him, but most Republican voters don’t have such confidence in the party leadership.

In spite of his obvious talents and ability, IMHO Gingrich has shown himself to be thoroughly in the country-club wing of the GOP that is…uncomfortable…if not hostile, to the GOP’s would-be grass-roots conservative base.   Once the inside initiates anoint their candidate, and the conservatives go out and support him/her, then they are supposed to fade back into the lawn until needed again for the next election cycle.

Been there.  Done that. 

“Ain’t gonna work on THAT farm no more!” increasingly seems to be the attitude of the potentially GOP conservative base, as it indicated even more strongly in this result:

73% of GOP Voters Say Congressional Republicans Have Lost Touch With Their Base

President Obama told an audience at a Democratic Party fundraiser Wednesday night that Republicans often “do what they’re told,” but GOP voters don’t think their legislators listen enough to them.

Just 15% of Republicans who plan to vote in 2012 state primaries say the party’s representatives in Congress have done a good job of representing Republican values.

A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that 73% think Republicans in Congress have lost touch with GOP voters from throughout the nation. Twelve percent (12%) are undecided. These numbers are basically unchanged from a survey in late April.

Time will tell if the GOP leadership starts to get the picture or not.

In an op-ed published Sunday, Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina joined with Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts, the chamber’s leading Democratic advocate of climate legislation, to promote a bipartisan plan to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions.

They proposed a compromise that reduces U.S. carbon-dioxide emissions – which are widely considered to contribute to climate change – through a market-based “cap and trade” system, combined with a “clean energy” program providing incentives for nuclear power, offshore oil and gas drilling, and coal emissions controls.

The nuke bit, and POSSIBLE extra drilling are good, but doesn’t offset the rest of the Cap and Tax provisions.

Overall, with Republicans like Sen. Graham-cracker, who needs Democrats?

UPDATE: Graham-cracker isn’t alone in exemplifying the RINO attitude; of course Olympia Snowe(-blind) has made a career of this.

In the latest round of the increasingly heated intra-GOP feud, former Secretary of State Colin Powell Sunday defended his Republican credentials and fired back at radio host Rush Limbaugh and former Vice President Dick Cheney, saying the party had to expand beyond its conservative base.

“Rush will not get his wish and Mr. Cheney was misinformed – I am still a Republican,” Powell said in a much-anticipated interview on CBS’s “Face the Nation” two weeks after Cheney suggested on the same show that the retired general had left the party by endorsing Barack Obama last fall.

Frankly, that dog don’t hunt. Powell has endorsed Donk policies, criticized the GOP, and endorsed B.O.

Applying the rule that “If it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, so it’s a duck!”, then in spite of any protestations to the contrary, Colin Powell has moved himself out of the GOP to the Donk side.

Whoo-hooo!

California voters head to the polls next week with predictions of doom echoing in their ears if they decline to endorse the massive tax hikes prescribed for them by big Democratic majorities in the statehouse, Arnold and a handful of now ruined-politically Republican legislators.

“Shrill” doesn’t begin to describe the campaign designed to stampede the Golden State electorate. The latest ad has a weary, soot-covered fire-fighter urging a yes vote on the tax hike. The message is clear: Vote no and your homes will burn down.

Not even this sort of fear-mongering is moving the needle towards “yes” on the massive tax surge on next week’s ballot as poll after poll shows all the key measures put forward by the tax-and-spend-and tax-again crowd failing badly.

Good for California, if this trend continues.

Arnold is doing his best to summon up the old magic but his appeal long ago hit Gray Davis-levels. Arnold was elected to slash taxes and spending, and somehow he confused that mandate with orders to throw in with the public employee unions. Too bad. He could have been a contender.

The GOP “leaders” who signed on to this roadmap to ruin have been dumped by their caucuses, and go down in California history as the biggest marks to have ever had a seat at the poker game known as the “Big Five” negotiations wherein the governor and the top Republicans and Democrats in the State Assembly and Senate hash out budget matters.

Jerry Brown, Gavin Newsom and every other would be Democratic governor are watching their chances in ’10 swirl down the drain as deep disgust with the tax-addicted grows.

Looks like the voters aren’t buying into the Governator’s transplanted version of Austrian-style National State Socialism.

What happens next is anyone’s guess because very few people think Arnold has any game left and so the state is effectively leaderless after its voters deliver an unambiguous message to carve state government back to the bone.

The first logical step would indeed be massive downsizing in the state government outside of public safety and education. Public assistance budgets will have to be slashed, and public employee pensions renegotiated to manageable levels.

California’s budget woes are much greater than those of GM and Chrysler combined, but no give-backs have even been requested of the public employee unions beyond a symbolic loss of a holiday or two lost. Entitlement payments have to be slashed and state assets sold.

The Golden State is bankrupt. It needs a quasi-bankruptcy proceeding, and it needs it now.

It’s fitting that the film Terminator Salvation is coming out too…looks like the voters are taking the title to heart, and seeking their salvation.

President Obama and Vice President Biden publicly welcomed Sen. Arlen Specter to the Democratic Party Wednesday, calling him a man of “immense personal courage” and “unmatched integrity.”

Does this mean he lives up to the high ethical standards of Charlie Rangel, Charles Murtha, and the tax honesty of SecTreas Geithner and the former Sen. Daschle?

Personal courage to jump parties? When he was down +20% in the GOP primary polling? Yeah. right.

Hope he didn’t let the door hit him in the ass on the way out! Good riddence!

Read the Constitution: D.C. is not a state

Which part of Article I, Section 2 do proponents of the District of Columbia House Voting Rights Act of 2009 not comprehend? The Constitution of the United States clearly states that “the House of Representatives shall be composed of members chosen every second year by the people of the several states.” The Constitution created D.C. as the federal “seat of government” – not as a state. Therefore, D.C. cannot have a voting Member of the U.S. House of Representatives. Proponents are correct that the Constitution gives Congress the right to make all laws for the District. But that clearly does not permit Congress to substitute its will for that of the whole people to rewrite the Constitution. So, until the Constitution is amended to make D.C. a state, creating a voting representative for it as if it were a state would be “the most premeditatedly unconstitutional act by Congress in decades,” in the words of George Washington Law School professor Jonathan Turley.

There’s some further extension of this in the cited OpEd…it’s worth the read IMHO.

Sounds clear enough, at least to someone who can read, and properly attach actual meanings to words. Ooops. Apparently that leaves out much of the current Donk dominated People’s Congress….

Few roadblocks expected for D.C. voting rights bill

Congress is poised to grant the District of Columbia a legislator with full voting rights in the House of Representatives.

After failed attempts in previous years, a wide Democratic majority in Congress and a Democrat in the White House have paved the way for the possible success of the bill, but there is still a chance Senate Republicans could block it.

The legislation would add two members to the House roster — one from the District, the other from Utah — increasing its ranks to 437.

This is designed to throw a political bone to the Republicans, and all too sadly, a number of them are willing to roll over on command and accede to the Donks’ latest assault on the Constitutional order, which isn’t made any better by the application of this “bipartisan” fig-leaf.

Unfortunately, there isn’t a hint in all this of actually respecting the Constitution enough to do it the right way, with a constitutional amendment.

As a historical note, this sort of swapping of Congressional seats to maintain a superficial balance has happened before; most notably in the Missouri Compromise, allowing the admission of Missouri as a slave-holding state, along with Maine as a non-slave state.

It’s telling that the current state of the body politic is such that this kind of juggling of representation is the only thing that apparently allows the (illusory) continuation of political agreement.

UPDATE:

The Senate passed a key preliminary vote Tuesday morning for the District to get full voting rights in Congress. Senators voted 62-34 to take up the legislation. A final Senate vote to approve the legislation could come as early as Tuesday afternoon.

Sadness.

Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina of the Senate Budget Committee said today on “This Week” that he is open to “nationalizing the banks.”

“I think if you put most of our major banks under a ‘stress test,’ they’re going to fail,” Graham told me.

“This idea of nationalizing bank is not comfortable but I think we have got so many toxic assets spread throughout the banking and financial community throughout the world that we’re going to have to do something that no one ever envisioned a year ago, no one likes,” he said.

“To me banking and housing are the root cause of this program,” Graham said. “I would not take off [the table] the idea of nationalizing the banks.”

With RINOs like Sen Lindsey Graham-cracker, who needs Donks?