Is the GOP the party of intolerance? If SoCons get their way, the answer is yes.

Single-issue social conservatives are just as myopically stupid as single-issue liberals.....

From NationalJournal -- Several socially conservative organizations have threatened to boycott one of the largest gatherings of conservative activists of the year if a group of gay Republicans is allowed to serve as a participating organization at the event.

Social conservatives, including the National Organization for Marriage among others, staged a walk-out at a meeting of board members of the Conservative Political Action Conference, according to multiple board members, to protest CPAC's decision to allow GOProud to join the event as more than just a vendor organization.

Listen up you moralistic social cons, not every conservative is a carbon copy of you. The country is sliding quickly toward fiscal disaster with $4trillion in debt and $30trillion in unfunded future liability, the Marxist nanny-State is rapidly expanding it tentacles into every facet of American life, and unchecked liberalism poses a very real existential threat to the constitutional republic the framers envisioned, yet you wring your hands and get your shorts in a wad over some good conservatives who happen to be gay being allowed to sit at the table at the CPAC conference? Seriously? Republicans claim to be the big-tent party but your heterosexual litmus test makes you, and us libertarians by association, look like exclusionary moralists.

Why do you care if gay people want to call what they do "marriage"? How does that affect you exactly? In a free country, people can pursue happiness in any legal way they like, as long as it doesn't impede anybody elses' pursuit of happiness. How do gay people being gay impede your pursuit of happiness?

If you are so intolerant of people who are slightly different from you, then go! Leave and form your own straights-only conservative caucus. Good riddance!

GOP should not be distracted by social cons

In the wake of the Tea Party-inspired midterm victories, small government, economic conservatives are worried that the GOP will now return to it's habit of focusing on social issues and ignore the mandate from the voters to focus instead on reducing the federal government, lowering taxes, and generally getting the government out of our lives. To that end, the GOProud group, a gay conservative organization, penned an open letter to GOP congressional leadership urging them to stick to their charge and stay away from social issues.....

From Politico -- "When they were out in the Boston Harbor, they weren't arguing about who was gay or who was having an abortion," said Ralph King, a letter signatory who is a Tea Party Patriots national leadership council member, as well as an Ohio co-coordinator.

I couldn't agree more. Insisting that "conservative" = dogmatic adherence to party-defined ideas of morality and personal behavior is a losing position for republicans. With the country heading toward the economic abyss and the government becoming intractably large, quixotically worrying about gay marriage, abortion, the war on drugs, Internet content, or whether women can own sex toys(all are associated with republican busy-bodies) is losing sight of their election-day mandate.

My advice to republicans in congress: do not take for granted the reliable and dutiful votes of Tea-Party conservatives. If you abdicate your responsibility to fulfill your campaign promises, the ire of the tea parties will be at you in two years, not Obama.

Tea Party outrage explained

As you know, Michelle Malkin sold Hotair for maybe millions, and the new host is a guy named Allahpundit. Anyway, I was reading some of the comments regarding the O'Donnell win over Castle in Delaware and this guy whose handle is picklesgap explained far better than I ever could, why the tea party people are so steamed at establishment republicans, so I copied it and here it is....

Let me explain why the establishment like castle SUCK

The whole thing is this, Allah.
Every election… EVERY @#$%@ ELECTION, conservatives in the GOP are told to suck it up and walk a mile with the “electable” moderate candidate (bush i, dole, bush ii, mccain). we are told to shut up, get in line, and get out the vote. sure, we knock on doors and hand out flyers and work hard — because we are all part of the GOP. but still, even though we don’t “LOVE” our guy, we support him.
now, in 2010, for the first time since what, 1964? 1980? the establishment ayatollahs haven’t gotten their way.
Got that? the FIRST ELECTION IN 30-45 YEARS that MIGHT be a TRUE CONSERVATIVE election —-
—and the establishment acts like a bunch of spoiled 12-year-old girls.
Florida: Crist runs as an indie
Pennsylvania: SPecter runs as a dem
Alaska: Murkow trying to run as a lib
Delware: Castle badmouthing gop, wont even CALL christine
Nevada: tarkanian bashing angle STILL
Kentucky: mcconnell acting pissy about rand paul
you see, the FIRST AND ONLY TIME IN DECADES that the “conservatives” are having their way….
…..the “establishment” won’t get in line.
we’ve fallen in line for 50 years, NOW we have ONE SINGLE TIME — and they all take their toys and go home.
Screw that allah — surely you can see it’s massively unjust. All those donations over the decades, for what? we’re basically pawns to their kings!

Right you are picklesgap! Right you are! YEAH!!!

Out with the old, in with the new

Establishment republicans took it on the chin last night....

Tea Party favorite Christine O'Donnell beat nine-term Republican Rep. Mike Castle in Delaware's GOP Senate primary.

In addition, long-time republicans lost primaries to tea-party candidates in New York and possibly New Hampshire. Despite the predictions and dire warnings of establishment conservatives Karl Rove and Charles Krauthammer(both of whom I admire and respect), conservative voters in these states voiced their outrage at how the old-school GOP has utterly failed repeatedly to advance conservative principles.

This morning, beltway republicans are lamenting in particular, the victory of Christine O'Donnell, because she's not their idea of the perfect GOP candidate, and are threatening to withhold GOP funding of her general election run. This sour-grapes attitude at losing one of their good-old-boys to a tea-party unknown is precisely why garden-variety conservatives are kicking to the curb everybody in office for whom there is a conservative replacement.

I say, excellent!!! Hill republicans have been a conservative embarrassment for 20 years and it's about time to get some new, true conservative blood in Washington.

Footnote: if the national GOP machine does not enthusiastically endorse and support Christine O'Donnell's bid to replace Joe Biden's vacant seat in the Senate, then they'll not get another dime of my money and I suggest you do the same.

Joe Barton's "shakedown" comment was spot on!

BP CEO Tony Hayward showed up yesterday to be tarred and feathered by grandstanding politicians from both parties. It was all just pointless political theater, designed to score populist political points with dumb Americans who're clamoring for empathy from Washington. Nothing makes a craven politician's heart race like an evil executive on his knees letting them kick him repeatedly in the mouth in front of the cameras. If anybody can tell me what the purpose of the hearings were, I'd enjoy hearing all about it.

Now, I'm not saying that BP doesn't bear most if not all the financial and clean-up responsibility for the spill and it's lasting effects, or that Tony Hayward isn't sort of a villain but, when Barton said that Obama's demand for $20billion was a shakedown, he was dead on! There's already a mechanism in place to compensate claims from affected Gulf residents with dozens of offices where claims are being quickly processed. The money is already being doled out. Why should the federal government be involved at all rather than the governors or mayors of the states? Answer: because the current process bypasses the federal bureaucracy and Obama will not let a $20billion pot of gold be spent without his administration directing where it goes. Nor will he allow this crisis be resolved without him receiving all the credit for resolving it. Obama promised that an independent person will see to the distribution of the money, yet he appointed the pay czar Ken Feinberg, a far-leftist Obama drone, to oversee it. Remember how they distributed the billions from the car-company collapse? It all went to the unions. Feinberg, under Rahm Emanual's direction, will direct this BP money to those in Obama's political favor. The lying, obfuscation, and treachery continues unabated from this administration.

My other point is that after Barton exposed the shakedown for what it was, an unconstitutional extortion of money from a private company to which the government has no claim whatsoever, other band-wagon republicans, John Boehner, Mike Pence, and Eric Cantor all piled on Barton to condemn his statement. Yesterday, Hill republicans were no better than degenerate democrats.

This is why republicans like these don't deserve their seats as representatives. When the cameras are rolling and everybody is doing the wrong, though popular thing, they fall in lockstep rather than doing the difficult, correct thing which is to tell the truth. Shame on Boehner, Cantor, and Pence for not standing up for Barton, the only republican with the balls to speak his mind.

Newt Gingrich clings to yesterday's republican party

I've always been a big fan of Gingrich and many of his ideas on conservatism are sound but, he relegates the tea-party conservatives to the fringe of the GOP at the peril of his own relevancy......

Gingrich said the movement is a "natural expression of frustration with Republicans and anger at Democrats," which is "more likely to end up as the militant wing of the Republican Party".

Hey Newt, when did fiscal responsibility, low taxes, and small, unobtrusive government become militant? I thought these were the tenets the GOP has stood for all this time. If those beliefs are considered militant to beltway republicans like you, then I haven't left the republican party, it has left me.

Lindsay Graham's treachery on cap and trade

If you thought Olympia Snowe was a bad RINO for voting for Chairman Zero's awful health-care debacle, take a gander at possibly the worst republican since Arlen Specter.....Lindsay Graham of South Carolina....

Earlier this year, House Democrats approved a 1,400-plus page Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade energy bill that was then promptly pronounced all but dead on arrival in the Senate. Now along comes the South Carolina GOPer to save the Democrats' second biggest priority, next to socializing doctors and patients.

Graham will trade a hollow promise from Democrats of more nuclear power and off-shore oil and gas development in return for his support of Waxman-Markey. He forgets that Democrats can promise anything like that now without fear because they know Environmental Protection Agency and the Sierra Club will keep it from ever actually being done.

Cap and trade will likely increase everybody's energy bill by a whopping 70%, plus seize a new tax from families for the Obama administration to invest in idiotically useless "green energy" boondoggles. Boondoggles like wind, solar and, ethanol-based energy that the private sector rightly deemed too risky and unreliable to in which to invest. But riskiness, inefficiency, and pointlessness don't matter to the government because it doesn't have to make a profit. The government and Lindsay Graham can waste as much of other peoples' money as it wants, on behalf of the wholly, imaginary menace of global warming.

Graham just got elected so he's hoping the people of SC will forget about this treachery but, when they are huddling in the dark and shivering in the cold because they can't afford to pay their power bills, maybe they'll rethink their vote the next time around.

Like Michelle Malkin always says, "God save us from bipartisanship!"

Hat tip to the WashingtonExaminer.

Conservatives are fed up....finally

Conservatives, emboldened by the surprise candidacy of Doug Hoffman in NY-23 and sickened by the wishy-washy moderates who currently hold many GOP seats, are eyeing races all over the country....

From Politico - In what could be a nightmare scenario for Republican Party officials, conservative activists are gearing up to challenge leading GOP candidates in more than a dozen key House and Senate races in 2010.

Conservatives and tea party activists had already set their sights on some of the GOP’s top Senate recruits — a list that includes Gov. Charlie Crist in Florida, former Rep. Rob Simmons in Connecticut and Rep. Mark Kirk in Illinois, among others.

Activists predict a wave that could roll from California to Kentucky to New Hampshire and that could leave even some GOP incumbents — Utah Sen. Bob Bennett is one — facing unexpectedly fierce challenges from their right flank.

Over at Hotair, Michelle Malkin presents an article by Doctor Zero which sums up nicely the wave of conservative, tea-party sentiment which threatens entrenched republicans. Here's an excerpt....

Meanwhile, the Republicans keep running “moderates” who prove to be very useful to the Democrats… which keeps the growth of the State bubbling along at Bush levels. The radical nature of the current Administration makes the idea of “moderate” compromise laughable. What’s the moderate position on freedom-crushing trillion-dollar health care and environmentalist legislation? They’re okay, as long as the Democrats pinky-swear to keep the cost under $800 billion? That’s the kind of promise no politician could keep, even if it was made in earnest. A moderate Republican is someone who lives in a state of perpetual surprise as he ponders the monthly bills for nanny-state government. What’s the point of electing people who are guaranteed to spend the rest of their political careers complaining about how they’ve been played for fools?
Too much of the Republicans’ “Stupid Party” strategy is based on the mechanics of getting people with little elephants on their campaign signs elected. They view the election as the conclusion of a contest, when in fact it’s only the beginning. A successful Republican Party doesn’t have to be ideologically rigid, but it should insist on candidates who possess an intellectual foundation of conservative theory, and the ability to explain it at least as well as the thousands of people posting comments on conservative blogs.



On the chopping block?

Time for paybacks!!!

From Michelle Malkin, these are the 8 despicable, traitorous republicans who voted FOR the heinous Cap-and-Trade bill that passed the House Friday by 7 votes....

For those of you who are represented by these villainous, treacherous rats, work hard to elect somebody, anybody in place of them. Send a message to other craven politicians that if they go against the will of the people they represent, it'll cost them their cush jobs.

Likewise, if you are a conservative who is represented by one of the 44 democrats who voted against the bill, call their office and tell them you are proud of them for standing up to the idiotic, cap-and-trade money-grab of Obama and Pelosi.

Romney, Romney, he's our man.....if he can't do it....

SC Governor Mark Sanford was the odds-on favorite to challenge The Obamessiah is 2012. Now that he stepped on his own you-know-what, the race seems to be wide open, but is it? Let's take a quick look at the contenders....

LA Governor Bobby Jindal - He's a terrific conservative and has significantly cleaned up the most corrupt state in the union but, he's young and in his first term. Most think he's biding his time until 2016.

AK Governor Sarah Palin - She might be the best conservative in the bunch but let's face it, she's the punchline to too many jokes and if she can't be taken seriously, what real chance does she have with the media hysterically against her?

Gen. David Patraeus - Americans love generals as politicians. Patraeus saw the surge through to success and stood his ground against an extremely hostile congress and media. A great guy but, we don't really know his politics so he's sort of a long shot for now.

Former AR Governor Mike Huckabee - I think Mike took his best shot in '08. I like him personally and politically but, he comes from too close to the religious right to have broad appeal in a general election. And I'll bet his wife prefers the easy life of a talk-show host's wife to the rigors of a presidential campaign.

MN Governor Tim Pawlenty - Pawlenty gets a lot of checks on the conservative checklist but, his state elected idiot Al Franken to the senate, and Pawlenty seemed to exert no influence or control over the process of recounting, even in a non-partisan way.

GOP whip in congress from VA Eric Cantor - He's definitely an up-and-comer in the GOP. Young, good looking, and smart. He needs some seasoning before shooting for the stars. He might think that if a community agitator from the corrupt city of Chicago can win, why can't I? Answer: because the feckless media and 63.7million moron voters won't hand deliver you to the White House. You'll have to earn it.

Which leaves us with former Governor and economic whiz Mitt Romney - Romney's conservative credentials are unquestionable and he almost beat McCain for the nomination in '08. Who cares if he's a Mormon. You religious-right fanatics need to get over yourselves. If the economy is still floundering under The One's disastrous policies, then Romney will be the money guru to save the day. Unless somebody comes out of the woodwork, kind of like the way Obama did, for the GOP, then I predict Romney might be the guy for us in 2012.

McCain may pay the price for fecklessness

Looks like John McCain's chickens are coming home to roost.

From Politico...

Social conservatives tolerated John McCain as the party's nominee, but never trusted him, and he now appears to be facing a serious primary from the right in Arizona next year.

Chris Simcox, the founder of the Minuteman Civil Defense Corps and a prominent figure in the movement to clamp down on illegal immigration, will be announcing tomorrow at an event on the Mexican border that he's resigned from the group to run in the 2010 Senate primary.

Besides being an abysmally weak GOP candidate against the Cult-of-Obama tsunami, McCain has serially failed to secure the borders in his home state of Arizona, and he rushed back to DC during the election to vote FOR, I said FOR, the absurd bailout bill. The last election was no time for a supposedly conservative candidate to go quietly along with the tide of socialism and media sycophancy that swept a far-left, socialist community agitator into the White House. Had McCain stood his ground and held to conservative principles, he might have pulled it off. Maybe not, but he could have come much closer and he wouldn't be electorally threatened from his right flank in 2010. I hope Simcox wins. It'll be a wake-up call for other self-proclaimed "conservatives" to stick to conservatism on the job, not just during each campaign.

Time to clean the GOP house?

Over at Michelle Malkin's site, I read a comment from a reader regarding why the republicans in DC were oddly silent when it was revealed yesterday that DHS was officially targeting garden-variety conservatives as dangerous subversives for innocuous "crimes" like resisting the usurpation of states' authority by the federal government, opposing open-borders immigration policy, and favoring limits on abortion. I think she struck a common chord with disgruntled conservatives who're attending these tea parties.....

"Absolutely! Where was the GOP today when we found out that Napolitano is spying on us bible-toting, gun-clinging right wingers? Silent. Deafening silence. They have no backbone in the GOP anymore, and it’s why I registered Libertarian earlier this year."

I think comments like these should put incumbent republicans on notice that they had better be standing up for conservatism from now on or risk losing seats to other GOP candidates or candidates from the libertarian party. Hopefully if nothing else comes from these tea parties, that'll be the take-home message for GOP politicians.

With republicans like these, who needs democrats?

Here is the bill, HR 1664, that passed the House on Tuesday, which may result in some skeevy, DC bureaucrat determining how much money is reasonable for you to make as a private-sector worker...

To amend the executive compensation provisions of the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008 to prohibit unreasonable and excessive compensation and compensation not based on performance standards.

And here are the 10 turncoat House republicans who voted for it...

Republicans Voting 'Aye'

Rep. Gus Bilirakis [R, FL-9]
Rep. Virginia Brown-Waite [R, FL-5]
Rep. Anh Cao [R, LA-2]
Rep. Lincoln Diaz-Balart [R, FL-21]
Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart [R, FL-25]
Rep. John Duncan [R, TN-2]
Rep. Walter Jones [R, NC-3]
Rep. John McHugh [R, NY-23]
Rep. Dana Rohrabacher [R, CA-46]
Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen [R, FL-18]

If you are represented by one of these miserable, craven creatures, make them pay in their next election by kicking the bums out of office.

Daniel Hannan speaks truth to power

Here's Daniel Hannan representing Great Britain in the European Parlaiment ripping Gordon Brown a new one for doing the same things in the UK that Bush did, and now Obama is doing here in the US. I would pay good money to see a republican stand up in Congress and give this speech to Obama's face....



With Obama's ridiculous, race-based popularity, the feckless media ready to destroy any dissenters, and republicans compromised and rightfully shamed from having supported Bush's squandering of the budget surplus, nobody has the balls to stand up to Obama but, it would sure be satisfying to hear somebody do it anyway.

Plus, this guy's a better speaker without a teleprompter than The One is relying on a teleprompter to tell him what to say.

George Bush....big spender, not fiscal conservative

Besides the cult-like following that Obama attracted among stupid, young people, the single biggest reason the republicans didn't have a chance in this election was this one statistic.....

When President George W. Bush entered the White House in January 2001, the federal government had total revenues of slightly more than $2.03 trillion and expenditures of $1.79 trillion, leaving a budget surplus of slightly less than $240 billion.

Since 2000, government spending has increased by more than 55 percent.

George Bush, under the ridiculous farce called "compassionate conservatism", did more to increase the size of the nanny-State than any democrat since FDR, the nanny-State inventor. Barack Obama simply seized the opportunity to exploit dumb Americans' need for government care.....need that George Bush largely created. The One will have to do some pretty big taxing and spending to outdo Bush when it comes to enlarging the behemoth federal bureaucracy.

At least democrats are honest socialists

You want to know just how far the republican party has departed from the philosophy of economic conservatism under George Bush, look no further than the 2008 republican party platform. Lee over at Right-Thinking absolutely nailed it. The platform clearly states:

We do not support government bailouts of private institutions. Government interference in the markets exacerbates problems in the marketplace and causes the free market to take longer to correct itself. We believe in the free market as the best tool to sustained prosperity and opportunity for all. We encourage potential buyers to work in concert with the lending community to educate themselves about the responsibilities of purchasing a home, condo, or land.

If you are represented by a republican in Congress or the Senate, you should rub his nose in this statement like you rub a dog's nose in his own steaming pile of crap. Then tell him a vote for this bailout bill equals a lost vote by you for him in his next re-election. That's exactly what I did today.

GOP.......big-time spenders

Want to know why the GOP might lose the Presidency this year, as well as suffer huge defeats in both houses of Congress? Look no further than the dreadful, pork-laden transportation bill Bush gladly signed into law a week ago. Here are some highlights, or should I say lowlights?

-$98,000 by House appropriator Virgil Goode (R-Va.) to develop a walking tour of Boydton. The town has a population of 474, and covers .82 square miles.
-$98,000 by Rep. John McHugh (R-N.Y.) for renovations to the Wakely Lodge Resort, the site of a nine-hole public golf course in Indian Lake.
-$245,000 by Senate appropriator Patty Murray (D-Wash.), Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.), and Rep. Doc Hastings (R-Wash.) for construction of a Wine and Culinary Center, the purpose of which is to educate and promote the areas of viticulture, enology and culinary practices, and showcase the quality of Washington’s wine industry.
-$14,878,000 added by the House for the International Fund for Ireland (IFI). IFI, established in 1986, is an organization whose objectives are to promote economic and social advance and to encourage contact, dialogue and reconciliation between nationalists and unionists throughout Ireland, despite the fact that peace has broken out in Ireland and the Irish economy is the strongest in Europe.

These are just snipets of the 11,610 pork projects that cost $17.2 billion of American taxpayers' money. If people want a walking tour of their town, they can pay for it. If Washington wants to showcase it's wine industry, let the taxpayers of Washington pay for it. If golfers want a nicer clubhouse, raise membership dues. And why do we give a crap if the Irish people like each other? These are nothing but incumbent re-election bribes and corrupt politicians snicker as they shove their hands in our wallets to pay for it. The GOP deserves to lose, big time! As much as I loathe the Obamessiah, it might be what is needed to wake up the big-spending republicans in DC.....but I doubt it.

The self-inflicted decline of the GOP

It's getting to the point that you can barely distinguish between democrats and republicans anymore. What used to be the party of small, limited government, low taxes, low spending, champions of the free enterprise market economy, is now the party of big spending, crippling regulations, and environmental lunacy. That being the case, we can expect to see more of this sort of thing...

In a major blow to national Republicans, a Mississippi congressional seat that once voted for President Bush by a twenty-five point margin elected a Democrat on Tuesday. Prentiss County Chancery Clerk Travis Childers beat out Republican candidate Greg Davis, the mayor of Southaven, by a 54%-46% margin, a spread that several Republican strategists on Capitol Hill characterized as a startling wake-up call for a party in dire straits.

The whole idiotic notion of "compassionate conservatism" is a canard for big government liberalism....and true conservative voters are sick of it. It's the very thing that has given rise to liberterian candidates like Bob Barr of Georgia polling around 7% even though he just announced his candidacy this week. Half the country(the stupid lazy half) wants the imperial federal government to be responsible for every part of their daily life so they don't have to make any decisions or be held accountable for their own failures. Plus they resent the fact that some Americans have more than they do, and they relish in the idea of the government taking what others have earned and giving it to them. These degenerates will ALWAYS vote for which ever democrat promises them the biggest goody bags filled with the earnings of better people than them. This class warfare is how democrats get elected. And it means that unless you conservatives want to live out the rest of your lives working to support the shiftless class(translated: democrat voting base), then you had better elect politicians who'll return to conservative principles of self-reliance and personal responsibility.

Republicans are already expected to lose seats in both Houses in November. I'm starting to think that what the republican party needs is a traumatic losses this election cycle to shock them into behaving like conservatives rather than the power-addicted, moderates they've become.

The bottom line is this: unless the republican party seriously returns to it's ideological roots, it might be destined to wander the desert for another 40 years, if not forever. Which brings us to our TRR poll question...

Would a democrat sweep across the board in November be good or bad for the republican party?
	Good: the GOP needs a wake-up call
	Bad: a liberal executive and legislative branch could do too much harm
	I don't care....can you post some pictures of Jennifer Anniston in a bikini?
Free polls from Pollhost.com

What?

This is the dumbest thing I've ever heard...

President Bush and First Lady Laura Bush said Tuesday that Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton's experience as first lady has prepared her to handle the "pressure" of a presidential race and the White House...

That's almost as stupid as me saying my experience having my wisdom teeth removed has prepared me for a career in oral surgery. I think what we're seeing is lame-duck syndrome. The Bush's think that if they're magnanimous and nice to people here at the end, then history will judge his administration favorably, and maybe Hillary won't say nasty things about them during the campaign next year. I wouldn't hold my breath there W.

Spending-wise, Bush is a big-government liberal

If I had to speculate on a single reason the democrats won Congress back, and why the republican base is at best unenthusiastic of late it would be because Bush spends tax-payer money like a drunken sailor on shore leave in Bankok...

WASHINGTON — George W. Bush, despite all his recent bravado about being an apostle of small government and budget-slashing, is the biggest spending president since Lyndon B. Johnson. In fact, he's arguably an even bigger spender than LBJ.

“He’s a big government guy,” said Stephen Slivinski, the director of budget studies at Cato Institute, a libertarian research group.

The numbers are clear, credible and conclusive, added David Keating, the executive director of the Club for Growth, a budget-watchdog group.

“He’s a big spender,” Keating said. “No question about it.”

Take almost any yardstick and Bush generally exceeds the spending of his predecessors.

When adjusted for inflation, discretionary spending — or budget items that Congress and the president can control, including defense and domestic programs, but not entitlements such as Social Security and Medicare — shot up at an average annual rate of 5.3 percent during Bush’s first six years, Slivinski calculates.

Fiscal conservatism is the cornerstone of the conservative/liberterian movement. When you have a president spending massive amounts of tax-payer money cloaked in the feel-good phrase "compassionate conservatism", it's a little hard to swallow that he's a conservative. It's as if they have succomed to the notion that voters have a price on their vote and the more you spend on voters, the more likely they are to vote for you. That's true if your base is composed of degenerate, shiftless, democrats. But those people will never vote republican, so you might as well stick to traditional conservatism and make your own voting base happy.

I realize the Bush tax cuts did wonders for the economy and that was great, but spending more because the government took in more taxes as a result makes as much sense as Al Gore's phony-baloney carbon credits giving him the right to live in several 10,000square foot houses and jet around the world on a whim. No wonder Hillary might be the next CiC...the republican base is so disillusioned with Bush the big-government conservative and all the congressmen who've signed on to that paradox. You cannot be conservative and dramatically expand the scope of the federal government. The two are mutually exclusive.