I have to believe that some time in the very near future, we will hear the words that British Conservative MP Nick Herbert said to day from the lips of a Republican. The openly gay member of Parliament spoke at length about gay rights and conservatism. Read more »

 

On January 19th, the very night Scott Brown won the MA special election, Sen. Evan Bayh said, “[t]here’s going to be a tendency on the part of our people to be in denial about all this, if you lose Massachusetts and that’s not a wake-up call, there’s no hope of waking up.” Read more »

Walter Russell Mead has written two pieces of work that explains the current political situation. In his first piece, he writes about the “Blue Model,” the American Social Contract that governed America from the end of World War II until the 1970s.

In the old system, both blue collar and white collar workers hold stable jobs, a professional career civil service administers a growing state, with living standards for all social classes steadily rising while the gaps between the classes remain fairly stable, and with an increasing ’social dividend’ being paid out in various forms: longer vacations, more and cheaper state-supported education, earlier retirement, shorter work weeks and so on. Graduate from high school and you were pretty much guaranteed lifetime employment in a job that gave you a comfortable lower middle class lifestyle; graduate from college and you would be better paid and equally secure.

Life would just go on getting better. From generation to generation we would live a life of incremental improvements — the details of life would keep getting better but the broad outlines of our society would stay the same. The advanced industrial democracies of had in fact reached the ‘end of history’: this is what ‘developed’ human society looked like and there would be no more radical changes because the picture had fully developed.

But things didn’t get better and better. By the 1970s, the Blue Model broke down and it has been dying a slow death since. This is a problem for the Democrats, since this model benefited them the most. You can basically see the end of the Democratic majority with the beginning of the end of the Blue Model.

In the next essay, Mead talks about “Feeding the Blue Beast.” He picks up where he left off and notes how this breakdown is problematic for the Democrats:

The blue social model was a triumph of progressive social imagination and political organizing; for two generations it effectively reconciled capitalism with the demand for a better living standard and more security for the population at large.

The breakdown of the blue model is the core problem of American society today and the key to the troubles of the Democratic party. Blue states really are blue; the ‘progressive imagination’ remains staunchly blue, and blue model interest groups like public school teachers, government employees, the remnants of the private union movement and the much healthier labor movement among public employees shape and mostly fund what Howard Dean famously called ‘the Democratic wing of the Democratic Party.’

Most Americans would like the blue model to stick around and are nostalgic for the security it once provided, but they understand that the great task of our times isn’t to save the blue model but to move on. The Democratic wing of the Democratic Party believes exactly the opposite: that the blue social model is the only way to go. If our city and state governments are groaning under the dead weight of inflated labor and pension costs, the only solution is to pump federal money into them somehow. If public schools aren’t working, they need more money — but seriously restructuring the system is out of bounds. If college and university tuition is exploding as the costs of education rapidly and continuously outpaces the general level of inflation, the only solution is to pump more money into the system while leaving it to operate much as it does.

Democratic policy is increasingly limited to one goal: feeding the blue beast. The great public-service providing institutions of our society — schools, universities, the health system, and above all government at municipal, state and federal levels — are built blue and think blue. The Democratic wing of the Democratic Party thinks its job is to make them bigger and keep them blue. Bringing the long green to Big Blue: that’s what it’s all about.

Three problems: we can’t afford it, people know that, and we desperately need the things that Big Blue can’t give us.

So, we need the services that Big Blue once gave us. We still need good schools. People also want to be able to afford health care. We want our elderly to not be impoverished. We want clean water, good highways and the like. But we can’t pay for them in the way we used to. We can’t just tax our way to prosperity when as Mead notes, people are no longer in secure jobs. And yet we need them.

Mead goes on to note that one of the reasons that we have a Tea Party movement is because we are worried as a public about how to pay for government services. But the Tea Party fails in that it proposes nothing as an alternative.

Mead ends his second essay with a pointed question for the Dems, but it is also a question aimed at Republicans:

Can the Democrats unshackle themselves from their degrading and destructive servitude to the blue beast before the Republicans build a new cohort of smart policy wonks with a practical vision for the future? Can either party develop the capacity for innovative leadership before the social and economic dysfunction of the current system drives us into a massive social and financial crisis?

So, here is my question: can the Republicans come up with a new social contract, a “Red Model?” Can we design a social model that is suited for this time and age?

I think Paul Ryan’s “Roadmap” is a start. I have some issues with it, but he is trying to create a new social model based on conservative principles. He is building up instead of just tearing down as the Tea Partiers are wont to do.

But there needs to be more conservative thinkers out there who can think about these issues. Opposition to Obama and the Democrats can only go so far. We need to propose our own vision for a new social contract.

A trial has recently concluded in a California Federal Court over the issue of same sex marriage.  The plaintiffs in Perry v. Schwarzenegger seek to overturn California’s gay marriage ban (Prop. 8) on the grounds that it violates the 14^th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.  The case is unique on many counts including the fact that the Judge conducted a full courtroom trial rather than a bare exchange of paper arguments.  It is also unique in that the plaintiffs are represented by a well-known conservative attorney who has used the case to shape a fascinating conservative argument for same sex marriage. Read more »

The current en vogue political arrangement is to prove one’s principles to the “ideals” of a party or ideological group. Both major political parties have fallen victim to this practice of confusing the opinions of some with philosophical principles. Some Democrats have criticized Speaker Pelosi for not standing up for abortion rights, while recently Republicans have circulated a possible purity test of 10 points – any candidate seeking to be considered a Republican must accept no fewer than 8 of the points under that proposal. Read more »

In the interest of advancing more policy-oriented discussions here at RU, I am reposting this item from my own blog. I wrote about the problem of gun trafficking at The Big Sticklast year.  Republicans have a long history of generally being on the right side of law enforcement, which is why we typically enjoy the support of police unions across the country. We also have traditionally been the best defenders of gun rights and have rightly resisted knee-jerk legislation aimed at taking guns out of the hands of law-abiding citizens in a futile effort to curb crime. We recognize that lawful gun owners are not the problem. But obviously gun crime continues to be a serious issue in this country. How can we reduce it? Read more »

Good stuff from the Watertown Daily Times:

During his nine-term tenure as Northern New York’s congressman, Republican John McHugh ably served by focusing on issues critical to the north country and its residents.

Whoever succeeds him will need a similar focus on Northern New York’s bread-and-butter concerns. The special election for Mr. McHugh’s seat is the opportunity to discuss those issues germane to the 23rd Congressional District.

So far, that has not happened. Outside interests have hijacked the three-way race between Republican Dierdre Scozzafava, Democrat Bill Owens and Conservative Douglas Hoffman. Read more »

You know, most of the time I like to think of witty titles to my articles that tie in somehow to the overall theme and tone. This time I choose to forego that route and opted for the straight forward approach. I simply posted the word courage.

My reasoning is simple: we as moderate Republicans need some of it. Actually as Americans in general we need it. We need to step it up. This is an issue that has been gnawing at me for weeks now. I believe we as Americans have gotten spoiled and weak. Where is the courage and gumption of of forefathers? The founders didn’t roll over and let the King get his way. They stepped up and had the courage, the backbone to say “no.” They didn’t get fainthearted or discouraged. They fought for what they wanted and stood up for what they believed in.

In today’s America for the most part we get hardly a whimper from most people and apathy runs rampant. This is one reason I support the tea parties and the protestors. Agree with them or not they have the courage to stand up say something, to fight for what they believe in. They don’t care what anyone has to say about them and I like it. We need such vigor. This is especially true with those in my age group. Being a 21 year most of my peers are content as long as they have MTV and their biggest concern is where their next Bud Light is coming from. We’ve gotten soft quite frankly. We’ve gotten overly politically correct, for instance you can’t oppose “Obamacare” without being “racist.” Ridiculous. I think a lot of it has to do with the media and it’s extreme influence over people, especially those at my age.

I believe the media has softened us up and made overly sensitive. We are a “fat and happy” nation that has been spoiled. When are country goes down the wrong track the vast majority of us do nothing because it “doesn’t effect me.” We have become a me driven society. People only care when it hits them. I think a lot of it has to do with the multicultural atmosphere that abounds in this nation. We used to be the melting pot. Now we are a nation that stands for nothing because we try to stand for everything. It may not be the most politically correct thing to say but deep down in my soul I feel it’s true. I think we have glorified the “sex, drugs, and rock and roll” culture at the expense of our national morale. Don’t get me wrong, I am not a morality legislator. I believe we should have cultural standards, I just don’t think the government should regulate them. They should be organic expressions of the people. Unfortuantely I believe we have organically expressed a culture of corruption and it’s become politically incorrect to say anything is wrong! You can’t claim anything is wrong without running the risk of being “racist” or any collection of words that end in “phobic.” I don’t think we can exist in a society that puts such a scarlet letter on opposition.

The point of this article is not to point out any specific issue but mostly to be a kick in the butt to moderate Republicans, or Americans in general. We are a nation birthed out of revolution. We, as a party, are the party of Abe, Teddy, and Ike, they fought for what they believed in. Even George W. Bush, love him or hate him, stood up for what he believed in.

My point is this, what’s left of us moderate Republicans need to band together and fight back. If we don’t like where our nation is headed we must do something about it. Our moderate representatives in Congress (what’s left of them) need to get a backbone implant as my Sergeant Major used to say. If we just sit by idly and let the far right and neocons continue to run our party we’re no better than them. At what point did we lose our fighting spirit? When did we lose our zeal and drive that is an essential part of Americana? When did we turn from a nation of fighters to a nation of whiners? From a the land of free to the land of politically correct? From the home of the brave to the home of the wimps? We need to turn back to those days and stop sitting by while these Wall St. fatcats and their D.C. enablers swindle us. They’re going to suck us dry and keep sucking until we push back.

The Washington Post ran a piece entitled Five Myths About Health Care in the Rest of the World on Sunday. It’s not an endorsement of any of the five health care plans Democrats are unwisely trying to sell America by any stretch. But it should be taken as a call to arms to anyone who thinks nothing needs to be done, or that following a European model spells the death knell for America.

The following boils the argument down pretty well, IMO:

In many ways, foreign health-care models are not really “foreign” to America, because our crazy-quilt health-care system uses elements of all of them. For Native Americans or veterans, we’re Britain: The government provides health care, funding it through general taxes, and patients get no bills. For people who get insurance through their jobs, we’re Germany: Premiums are split between workers and employers, and private insurance plans pay private doctors and hospitals. For people over 65, we’re Canada: Everyone pays premiums for an insurance plan run by the government, and the public plan pays private doctors and hospitals according to a set fee schedule. And for the tens of millions without insurance coverage, we’re Burundi or Burma: In the world’s poor nations, sick people pay out of pocket for medical care; those who can’t pay stay sick or die.

Our “crazy quilt” system is bloated and inefficient and needs to be changed. If you’re angry about the current plans, don’t just protest, join the conversation and let’s make a plan that works for all of us.

By Blake Sietz

“Here in America we are descended in blood and in spirit from revolutionists and rebels – men and women who dare to dissent from accepted doctrine. As their heirs, may we never confuse honest dissent with disloyal subversion.” –Dwight Eisenhower

As you may have already seen, the media is abuzz with news of town hall meetings, “death panels” <sigh>, and the “emergence of socialized medicine”. But what us generally-healthy teenagers don’t take the time to consider is that the health care debate (and some would say debacle) is important to everyone, regardless of age. It’s an intricate issue, with long-lasting ideological, moral, fiscal, and political implications.

It’s our job as citizens and dependents of the health care system to cut through the rhetoric and outright lies of biased media outlets to understand the implications of proposed reforms.

So what’s this bill about, anyway? Read more »

In a conference room. Maybe seven or eight government employees in their late 30s-early 40s. They’re wearing suits from Ann Taylor, or Men’s Wearhouse sitting on one side of a conference table that looks like it came right out of the Office Depot catalog In one hand they’re holding cups of coffee, or cans of Diet Coke (or some other caffeinated drink – they’ve been working late the last couple of nights) , the other hand busily hammering the keyboards of their mid-tier laptop computers, jotting down notes, trying to capture what the lady on the side of the table is saying.

Across the table is a woman in her mid 60s. Her blouse and pants recently purchased from the local Wal-Mart, her shoes from Payless Shoes. She’s nervously playing with her purse handles as she shuffles her feet. She’s not sure how to answer this last question. She should have been prepared for this question. She was…until just this second.

“We’d all like to get out of here today, Ma’am, so please answer as best you can,” the Committee chair sighs as she asks the question for the third time, “When you the government no longer finds you insurable…” she pauses, not for effect, but because she still can’t believe she has to ask the question.

“…how do you want to die?”

Chilling isn’t it? Â Cold, bureaucratic evil, like a scene out of the film CONSPIRACY. Â If certain right wing celebrities are to be believed this won ‘t be that far from the truth should Barack Obama’s health care plan pass both House of Congress.

But they are not to be believed. Â This is a a nightmare scenario crafted by self-styled leaders of the Republican Party. Â This is the kind of thing that has to stop.
*************************************

Let’s be honest: Obama’s Plan is a bad one. It’s costly beyond comprehension. It adds bureaucratic roadblocks to an already excessively bureaucratic process. And, despite all the costs, it only provides additional care for a small percentage of the nation’s uninsured.

It’s a bad plan with any number of weaknesses that Republicans can point to as reasons we should be vehemently against it. Is it necessary to make things up about it?

Who is helped by devising scenarios like the one described above? Does Sara Palin making up spooky stories about Obama’s DEATH PANEL, really add weight to the argument against the real plan?

Does comparing the health plan to Nazis [limbaugh-20090806-hitler.flv] like friend of the blog, Rush Limbaugh, has done?

The following is was written by a blogger named Bill. You can read his post at ReThink the GOP and also follower his Twitter posts.

The term “Grand Old Party” is a traditional nickname for the Republican Party, and the acronym, GOP is a commonly used designation.

Why should we rethink the GOP? For starters, I am of the opinion that this party is by and large often misunderstood. As a result, as a group we suffer from a growing perception problem and that needs to change. For starters, we need to work together to dispel the myth that the vast majority Republican Party members consist of greedy corporate oil baron fat cats that care about nothing but themselves. Nothing could be further than the truth of course and the goal of this site is to dispel some of those common myths and back them with the facts.

This website is also intended to serve as an open letter to Republican Party leaders to express my concerns and why I think that were in a desperate need for a makeover. But first a few fast facts:

• The Republican Party was first established in opposition expansion of slavery into Kansas.
• When first established the party put forward a progressive vision of modernizing the United States that emphasizing higher education
• Abraham Lincoln was a Republican and he’s credited for many social causes including uniting the nation and freeing the slaves
• President Theodore Roosevelt a Republican was a whose policies eventually led to the creation of the modern U.S. National Park Service
• President Richard Nixon was responsible for establishing the Environmental Protection Agency

•California Republican Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger sued the Federal Government and the United States Environmental Protection Agency for the right to set vehicle emission standards higher than the Federal Standard

The reality is that many Republicans are hard working small business people. In fact, millions of working Republicans care a great deal about the success of our country and the health and well being of our fellow citizens as well. Also, many of us are as compassionate as anyone and we care about many issues including global climate change, our insatiable appetite for oil and our environment just to name a few.

Now for that open letter to Republican Party leaders:

Should we be Rethinking the GOP? Yes, I think so and frankly it’s long overdue. I’m also growing tired of the vocal minority in this party influencing the direction of the party. The reality is that they don’t speak for me on every issue. Also and more importantly, this country is more diverse than ever and the Republican Party needs to change with the times.

In short, we need to rethink the GOP for the benefit of the party for both the short and the long term. We can’t succeed as a party if our strategy is one size fits all. If we don’t change the perception, I’m afraid that will grow even less relevant then we are today.

All of that said, I’m not suggesting that the party shudder the core values and principles of promoting less government waste and self reliance. Rather, we should be rethinking the GOP so we can reevaluate our party, improve upon our image and refine our messaging.

At a minimum, we need a strong national PR campaign that can help educate the masses including the younger and better educated Web 2.0 generation as to the rationale of our position so that we can remain politically competitive.

Bill

One day far right wing Republicans will wake up and realize that it’s the 21st century. I have a feeling most of them prefer to view the world from a Ronald Reagan 1980s worldview. They seem to offer up the same tired solutions, or non-solutions to issues. I believe as progessive/moderate Republicans we must take the bull by the horns and offer up viable 21st century solutions.  I have a few suggestions to a few problems that I believe we as centrists can rally behind. Read more »

America is currently engaged in three serious wars. The first two are the hotly debated wars in the Middle East. The Wars in Afghanistan and Iraq are huge, expensive operations that costs trillions of dollars to maintain and are essentially no victory quagmires. They are vast money pits that are debated in every region and corner of the nation. I won’t waste much space and talking about them as I have already mentioned my distaste for them in previous articles.

No the war I wish to discuss is a much older war.  This war was first spoken of in 1969 by President Nixon. Some estimates have this war clocked at almost 30 billion spent since the first of this year!* Questions abound also about it’s legality and some tactics used in this “war.”

I am talking about the “War” on drugs. What a disastorous, expensive boondoggle that is.  We flush billions a year on this war and from what I can tell it’s perhaps the most failed “war” of all time. Drug use still runs rampant and drug dealers are seemingly one step ahead of law enforcement at every turn. We spend billions to keep up however this “war” has been an abject failure. I think it’s hard to find a single person who has ever been seriously dettered from the idea of drug use because they were afraid of law enforcement.

As a younger American I know in high school drug use was widely accepted. No one seemed to give a second thought to the illegality of their pot smoking. We divert time, energy and precious money on taking down drug users when drug use is a victimless crime.

There is another way in which the “War” on drugs is expensive, the prisons we fill up with nonviolent offenders each year. As a corrections officer myself I have seen first hand just how overcrowded our prisons are. I would say well over half the inmates at the 1800 inmate facility I work at our drug offenders, whether they were selling, conspired to sell, were using, or just simply possessing. Look at this report from stopthedrugwar.org:

More than half a million people were behind bars for drug offenses in the United States at the end of last year, according to numbers from the Bureau of Justice Statistics. In a report released Sunday, Prisoners in 2004, the Justice Department number-crunchers found that people sentenced for drug crimes accounted for 21% of state prisoners and 55% of all federal prisoners.

That is billions of dollars we are flushing down the toilet to house nonviolent offenders each year. That’s money we could be spending to improve education so people wouldn’t turn to drugs. Or adequate healthcare so no American would go bankrupt because they happened to get sick or had pre-existing condition and couldn’t get coverage. Instead we are falling behind the rest of the world in healthcare and education so we can continue to play morality police and treat our citizens like children.

That brings me to my final point, the idea behind the “War” on drugs comes from a narrow, religious viewpoint of the world that wants to force it’s morality on the rest of the world. Why should we be forced to live our lives according to someone’s narrow, ridged religious outlook on the world. The fact is that marijuana use is no more harmful than alcohol. Yet conservatives have put such a negative taboo on marijuana that it is a third rail in America. I argue for the legalization of marijuana. Perhaps “hard” drugs can remain illegal, but lets call off the dogs. Lets end the “war” on drugs and stop treating drug use a criminal matter and make it a counseling matter. A personal problem that requires treatment not prison time. The public is not served by having to spend billions of dollars to house people for victimless crimes and get no help for their problem. Upon release they quickly turn to their old ways or worse. Prison often turns inmates into convicts and no one wins in that situation.

I also think we should go to a Canadian style needle exchange program where drug users can come to a public health center and exchange dirty needles for clean ones. I know some people say that it encourages drug use but I say it helps combat the spread of AIDS. Perhaps when a user comes in before they can get their new needles they must also read and sign something that states their increased risk to AIDS and other diseases. Maybe they must attend a one hour counseling session. There are plethora of better, more humane ways to approach the problem of drug use than to tag them as criminals and warehouse them for a few years.

The GOP can take a step forward and become leaders on this issue, I know we can do it. The future of this nation is decidedly left of center on this issue while the GOP remains in the early 80s. We can’t miss the boat anymore, the nation is steaming ahead with or without us.