This is my second annual “WKRP Turkey Drop Open Thread”

“With God as my witness, I thought turkeys could fly”

Happy Thanksgiving, my friends.  Enjoy the day, and give thanks to God today for the many blessings in your lives.

A group of conservative Republicans is set to offer a resolution be considered at next month’s Republican National Committee meeting in Hawai’i, calling on party candidates to embrace a majority of a group of ten positions based on core conservative principles to gain and retain RNC endorsements and funding.  I think it’s a brilliant idea that is right for the times.  I acknowledge that there are those who disagree and are concerned that such a resolution may end up bringing about more problems than it will solve.  But I hold that the resolution will help demonstrate to Republican base voters that the party is serious about a return to conservative principles.

Erick spoke for many conservatives in his reasoned and sincere criticism of the pledge resolution.  They are primarily concerned that requiring candidates to take a pledge of this kind will give liberal Republicans cover to proclaim themselves conservative.  They worry the pledge will result in more, not less, fiascoes like the DeDe Scozzafava candidacy in New York’s 23rd congressional district.

But the ten positions are written in a way that is broad enough that any Republican should be able to easily clear the bar of 8 out of 10 that the resolution requires.  Yet, the positions are specific enough to demonstrate both to base voters and disillusioned independents just what Republicanism entails.  And, the positions talk about what we as Republicans stand for, rather than simply what we stand against.

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68 years ago, Americans around the nation settled into a peaceful Thanksgiving weekend and celebrated with their loved ones. A week later, the nation was viciously attacked by Japan – an attack that sparked our involvement in perhaps the greatest of all wars.

This Thanksgiving holiday is different from that weekend. While we should likewise celebrate and give thanks for our innumerable blessings, this time, the American people are staring at an attack on our nation and can stop it. This attack is coming from within. The Obama/Reid/Pelosi healthcare bill – in its various forms - is an assault on the American way of life and an affront to all the generations before us who fought to preserve and protect our cherished freedoms.

Why? Because the bill will eliminate your God-given ability to care for your family according to YOUR wishes and YOUR conscience. It will insert Washington D.C., and the incompetent bureaucrats who live there, into your hospital room, your doctor’s office, your insurance company, your home and ultimately, into your personal health decisions. As analyzed here, the bill is loaded with active-government terms like “shall,” “tax,” and “require.” And, even a cursory review of the text will show how much power this bill gives Washington to interfere with your healthcare (you know, the town that brought you the TARP bailout, Katrina-relief and over $12 Trillion in debt and counting…). Qualifications, panels, reports, studies, mandatory insurance whether you want it or not, penalties, taxes, fees, mandates on coverage but restrictions on prices… and 2079 pages of non-stop assaults on your right to live free and care for your family as you see fit.

Say hello to lines, waiting rooms, priority lists and more expensive, less effective healthcare. Say goodbye to freedom.

That is, unless you act now. It is your job – indeed, it is your duty – to talk to your friends and family this weekend and in the coming weeks. Call them to action. Other than our fine men and women in uniform fighting around the world, there is nothing more important that you can be doing right now to preserve our children’s birthright – heirs to the greatest nation the world has ever known.

Read over the bill. Read summaries. Whatever you need to do. Try the Heritage Foundation’s website, http://fixhealthcarepolicy.com/. Then… pause the football games and take a break from the turkey and cranberry sauce. Talk to friends and family this weekend. Explain it to them.

Then… next week, when the Senate come back in session - call your Senator. Email more friends. Email more family. Then… Call your Senator AGAIN. Don’t stop. Repeat. Then… call Senators on the fence. And, feel free to start with Senators Ben Nelson (R-NE), Blanche Lincoln (D-AR), and Mary Landrieu (D- LA). They represent solidly red states - and need to have their feat held to the fire. The list of Senate office phone numbers can be found here. Shut their phones down. Flood their offices. Visit their offices.

The American people can win this, but only if you take action to stop it. There is one thing that elected representatives fear - and that is YOU, the American people. Celebrate Thanksgiving this year in the American way - by fighting for freedom and working hard to preserve this, the last best earthly hope for mankind.

• Inside the numbers: How Obama has fallen
  Wow. Other than black voters, the poor, and the Godless atheists of America, Barack Obama isn't exactly winning anymore.

Dang.

With President Obama having concluded his trip through one of the fastest-dying regions of the planet, complete with literal prostrations to a symbolic Emperor and metaphorical prostrations to an Emperor in all but name, this is as good a time as any to ask whether his Administration has developed a coherent foreign policy grand strategy yet. The evidence, to date, suggests that Obama foreign policy is like Obama campaign promises: destined to be realized in some shadowy future likely – but not certain – to come, yet already awarded rich accolades merely for promise.

The usual people who don’t understand foreign policy – which is to say, the sorts of people who are well-received, if not employed, by the State Department (which hasn’t understood foreign policy since Kissinger, or perhaps Dulles) – are of course charmed by the President’s playacting on the global stage. This is probably because the kabuki-dance of Metternichian diplomacy, though likely to allow untold millions to die of starvation, rape, genocide, torture, ethnic cleansing, and imprisonment, is more visually appealing than war and open conflict – not least because all of that starvation, rape, genocide, torture, ethnic cleansing, and imprisonment tends to happen in countries that don’t allow cameras near the atrocities.

This terrible conflation of form over substance elides the fact that Baron von Metternich developed the balance of power system he did to avoid a repeat of the devastation of Napoleon, and that ultimately, that very system of diplomatic communiqués, bows, negotiations, dinners, and playacting not only failed to avert the First World War, it positively accelerated and worsened the Second. In other words, the modern system is a shell of a remnant of a means of preventing a disaster that has long-since passed, and that failed miserably both times it was really well-tested. It is, in short, a system intended to devolve larger conflicts into smaller, more manageable ones, and is instead a method for preventing small conflicts by accumulating them into larger ones. Perversely, the whole, nominal point of the modern system of international diplomacy is to provide channels through which substantive foreign policy – that is, the real goals and desires of nations and nation-states – can flow without having more wars than necessary. Its loveliness should be secondary to its effectiveness. Applauding what President Obama has delivered – a foreign policy with better aesthetics than President Bush’s, without President Bush’s substance – is like wanting a faster car always stuck in the driveway: There’s no point if it’s not going anywhere.

Go read the whole thing.

We know from Haystack’s earlier post that Barack Obama’s “casualty count is nearly DOUBLE that of George Bush’s worst year as Commander in Chief.”

We know that Barack Obama is dithering while our soldiers and sailors die in Afghanistan. Yesterday, Barack Obama fell back on his typical blame Bush.

At a news conference in the East Room with Prime Minister Manmohan Singh of India, Mr. Obama suggested that his approach would break from the policies he had inherited from the Bush administration and said that the goals would be to keep Al Qaeda from using the region to launch more attacks against the United States and to bring more stability to Afghanistan.

“After eight years — some of those years in which we did not have, I think, either the resources or the strategy to get the job done — it is my intention to finish the job,” he said.

How exactly was George Bush not committed to stability in Afghanistan and stopping Al Qaeda from “using the region to launch more attacks against the United States.”

Just because the guy says it, does not make it so. But there is something more troubling in all of this that is flying under the radar.

In Obama’s “prosecution” of the war and dealing with military issues, he has decided to treat American soldiers and sailors worse than the terrorists.

Fox News is reporting that Navy SEALs have captured the mastermind behind the 2004 Fallujah massacre that saw 4 Blackwater USA employees murdered and mutilated.

What thanks is the Commander in Chief giving to these American heros? He is send them to court martial. Why? Because the terrorist got a bloody lip while detained.

Seriously.

In Barack Obama’s America terrorists are treated better than our soldiers and sailors.

From 6:00 a.m. to 9:00 a.m. this morning, I’ll be on WMAC-AM in Macon, GA filling in for Chris Krok.

You can listen here if you are interested.

RedState Morning Briefing
For November 25, 2009

Go to www.RedStateMB.com to get
the Morning Briefing every morning at no charge.

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It is so important, it bears repeating:

“I’ll vote against any bill without a public option,” said Sen. Roland Burris, D-Ill.

The quote is from ABC News, and right before the Burris-bomb, is this little ticking surprise for Reid:

“There are at least two Democrats who say they’ll vote against any bill that does not include a public option, and there may be many more.”

Perhaps Senator Lieberman’s courage is contagious.

While I hesitate to waste even a few seconds of my God-given time on this planet responding to Media Matters (you know, the “progressive” Media Matters… a 501(c)(3), tax-exempt organization dedicated to “comprehensively monitoring, analyzing, and correcting conservative misinformation in the U.S. media..”), with respect to this monstrocity of a bill, I SHALL “leave everything on the field” as they say.

So, in response to my post earlier titled “Words Mean Things,” in which I list just a few of the many words in the Senate health care bill that highlight the massive amount of power given to government at the expense of freedom, Media Matters wrote this dismissal.

What is so laughable about the liberal - er, uh, I mean “progressive” school of thought is the fact it simply ignores the Constitution until it suits “progressive” purposes (such as killing babies in the name of privacy - I wonder if Media Matters will do a word search for “privacy” or “penumbra” in the Constitution - but I digress), and even when “progressives” do tacitly acknowledge its existence, they ignore the rich history of its adoption.

The Constitution was, of course, the result of significant negotiation and compromise. Whether one agrees with the federalists of the day, the anti-federalists of the day, or finds himself in between - the reality is that the Constitution was all about power. That was its purpose. It’s a CONSTITUTION. It’s purpose was, and is, to use words like shall, may and tax, and to do so in a way that would be an acceptable balance of the power it would authorize.

Now, everyone with an elementary understanding of the history of our nation’s adoption of the U.S. Constitution understands this simple concept. They also understand that the Constitution was one that limited the powers given to the central or national government - and that by so limiting that power, any legislation offered by the Congress would not be about power-grabbing, but about focused legislation constrained by the limits imposed by the Constitution.

No one who has even an ounce of respect for the Constitution would suggest that this Obama/Reid Senate healthcare bill, the Pelosi House healthcare bill, or any variation thereof, fit within the limits given the national government.

They don’t.

Bush pollster Matthew Dowd looks at why he thinks it’s possible - not likely, mind you, but possible - for Sarah Palin to win the White House in 2012. (H/T) Along the way he reminds us that John Kerry was one of the few challengers in memory to lose a race against an incumbent that may actually have been winnable:

Gallup polls over the past 60 years show that no president with an approval rating under 47 percent has won reelection, and no president with an approval rating above 51 percent has lost reelection. (George W. Bush’s approval rating in the weeks before the 2004 election hovered around 50 percent.) The 2012 election will be primarily about our current president and whether voters are satisfied with the country’s direction.

Who the Republican candidate is, and his or her qualifications and abilities, will matter only if Obama’s approval rating is between 47 and 51 percent going into the fall of 2012. Interestingly, in the latest Gallup poll Obama’s approval rating was at a precarious 49 percent.

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Please welcome guest columnist Frank J. Fleming of IMAO! Frank is here to share with us some thoughts concerning the proposed RNC “Purity Test.”

Some people at the RNC had the idea to make a list of ten Republican principles and you won’t receive RNC funding if you disagree with three or more of them. That sounds like a neat idea, and it’s not a litmus test, as you can pick any two you want to be a squish on.

In fact, it’s such a neat idea I’m coming up with a list of my own ten Republican principles:

(1) Punching hippies is a legal form of expression.

(2) The moon should be declared hostile and nuked.

(3) The average American should be armed like Neo from the lobby scene at all times.

(4) Nachos are awesome.

(5) The federal government needs to stop wasteful spending. Also, researching giant war robots and dinosaurs with rocket launchers on them is not wasteful.

(6) America owns Antarctica.

(7) It’s not good diplomacy unless the foreign leaders are kneeling before us.

(8) Vampires shouldn’t sparkle.

(9) The fact that we torture terrorists isn’t horrific and is actually kind of funny.

(10) Biggest problem facing our nation: Too many sissies.

If you disagree with one of them, the punishment is for everyone to look at you and yell, “What’s wrong with you!” If you disagree with two of them, you get beaten up after RNC meetings. If you disagree with three, you lose RNC funding. And if you disagree with four or more, Fred Thompson punches you in the face such that your head explodes.

And no doubt unicorn rides, seeing as the third is just as likely to happen as the first two.

In case you’re wondering, this call is due to the announcement that census worker Bill Sparkman killed himself for the insurance money (H/T: R.S. McCain) - which means that he was not murdered by conservative monsters from the id, or murdered for ideological purposes - or, in fact, was murdered at all.  I’m sure that this would be an embarrassment for everyone on the Other Side who flogged this particular narrative, except this would imply that they cared about Sparkman in the first place.  Which they didn’t, so expect a grudging bare minimum, at best.

Moe Lane

PS: For the record: when you try to set up your suicide to make it look like you’ve been murdered by your ideological opponents, you have officially abrogated any obligation for me to be upset at your plight.

Crossposted to Moe Lane.

Four more US Soldiers died in Afghanistan yesterday as we continued to wait anxiously for Obama to make up his mind about how to respond to General McChrystal’s report. During the pre-surge days in Iraq, 4 dead soldiers was enough for every major news outlet to scream from the rooftops about the costs of war. Now? Hardly a whisper.

Why is it so hard, Mr. President, to DO something about Afghanistan-even if you have to adjust your strategy again later-given that doing NOTHING has only gained you more fallen heroes? Since taking office, YOUR casualty count is nearly DOUBLE that of George Bush’s worst year as Commander in Chief. Why? Since receiving McChrystal’s assessment back in late August, your casualty count is rapidly approaching half of the entire year’s total. Again, Mr. President, WHY?

I brought this up a month ago, asking the same question…and that was a month AFTER Obama had received MCrystal’s assessment. It’s been another month hence, and still no strategy. We’re hearing now that Obama may “lock in” his decision by next Monday, but we’ve been hearing that for weeks. What’s so special about next Monday, other than it’s the Senate’s first day back to begin debate on the healthcare debacle? And, what exactly does “lock” mean? We’ve already been given one strategy and now we’re about to get another. Does this President actually believe there is one and only one strategy and that no further adjustments will be necessary as conditions on the ground change? He’s just not that good at the war “thing” and neither are very many of his “war councilors” for that matter.

If the measure of “getting it right” is determined by how long it takes you to do it, could we PLEASE apply this principle to the REST of the Obama agenda? Maybe an extended “cooling off period” for healthcare, cap and trade, and the buyouts and sellouts of America’s private sector would be better served as well.

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Roll Call reports the Democrats intend to bring up immigration next year as a big fight leading into the 2010 elections. Their approach will be predictable — support extended family immigration, amnesty for all illegals, and no input from the GOP.

Lindsey Graham is no doubt beside himself with delight over this one.

This got me thinking though. The GOP is said to be absolutely opposed to immigration in all cases — some of you might like that, but it does not sell with the general voter. First, it is politically an untenable position. Second, very few of us are really opposed to all immigration. Being a second generation American, I cannot see myself being in favor of sealing up the borders in all cases whatsoever.

However, it seems a Democrat plan to allow full amnesty and extended family immigration will be politically unpopular not just with middle class white voters, but with a great deal of immigrants, Hispanic and otherwise, many of whom are having a hard enough time finding work without competing with a new influx of job seekers. I think the GOP has the ability to beat the Democrats at their own game on immigration next year if done right.

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• My favorite website
  Always captivating, especially with Nat Geo photographs.
• Providing Health Care for Illegal Immigrants: Understanding the House Health Care Bill
  Why yes, Joe Wilson is right. The Democrats are intentionally covering illegal aliens in their health care bill. None of them will have to adhere to the individual mandate however. Only citizens will have to do that.

I typically see eye to eye with RNC Committeeman Jim Bopp, but we are going to have to agree to disagree on a proposed resolution to be debated at the RNC’s Winter meeting. The media is calling it a “purity test” for Republicans. In essence, candidates would be presented with a list of vaguely worded issues and the RNC would be asked to withhold money from any candidate that disagreed with more than two.

Rome long ago stopped selling indulgences, but conservatives keep right on selling them. Look, for example, at NY-23. The moment Dede Scozzafava signed ATR’s no new tax pledge, she was absolved of all her sins, including voting for 198 tax increases in the New York legislature.

Therein lies the inherent problem with candidates signing off on well meaning pablum — there are no teeth and the party will not serve as its own enforcer.

While I applaud the desire of conservative RNC members to try to put the train back on the tracks, I am afraid this will do what the ATR pledge did in Scozzafava’s case — give a lot of candidates cover to pretend to be conservative. People are naturally inclined to short circuit educational processes. People will look at this list to see if a candidate signed off on the issues. If the candidate did, well by God they must be conservative — never mind their voting record or prior statements. After all, only a week before Scozzafava signed the ATR pledge she was bashing Hoffman for having signed it. Never mind though, all was forgiven once Scozzafava signed it too.

Conservatives in the RNC, however well meaning they may be, risk giving liberal candidates easy opportunities to get conservative endorsements simply by checking the box without ever meaning it.

Compare this to the Contract With America in 1994. That document had ten items that were substantive policy positions heavily poll tested and vetted to make sure something like 70% of the American public agreed with each one. Each statement was popular and therefore did not put candidates in awkward positions with voters, as some of the presently suggested issues do. And while there was no enforcement mechanism there either, there did not have to be — every issue was poll tested, mother approved, and voter supported.

Not so with this. And because this, unlike the Contract With America, might affect funding and seals of approval in the primary process, this becomes far more troublesome.

I would encourage the conservative members of the RNC to let conservatives sort out who is and is not a conservative, as opposed to letting any Dede sign up with no intention of ever living up to the pledge. Besides, the Republican Platform specifically says the GOP is opposed to government bailouts of industry, something the GOP, with a Republican President, pushed through Congress in 2008. If the GOP cannot live up to its own platform adopted at a national convention, it sure as heck won’t live up to any pledge put forward by a group of RNC committeemen.

Actions are far more important than words. We should leave it at that.

Rasmussen reports Obama’s Presidential Approval Index fell to -15. Another record low.

Rasmussen’s Obama Approval Index has now been in negative double digits for nine straight days. Last week the index stood at the previous record low, -14, for three consecutive days.

According to Rasmussen, support for the Democrats’ Obamacare has fallen to a new low of 38%. Sixty percent of voters believe passage of the bill will lead to higher health care costs.

It’s not just Rasmussen, Gallup, Quinnipiac, and Hawkeye all find Obama’s approval to be 48%.

As we have said before, the more voters find out about President Obama, the less they care for him and his radically liberal policies.

The Senate healthcare bill has numerous flaws – but you needn’t know the details to know that it erodes freedom, restricts your ability to care for your family according to your wishes, costs trillions of dollars, increases taxes, increases premiums and is so massive that it is impossible to comprehend fully. In fact, the 2074 page behemoth in the Senate is an interesting study in word choices that tell you all you need to know about the bill. See below for a list of select words – and I am not the only one to do such a review (I noticed, e.g., Lee DeCovnick over at American Thinker from yesterday here).

The word “shall” appears 3607 times, but “freedom” only twice. The word “penalty” and its various forms 163 times, but “liberty” doesn’t appear at all. The word “require” and its forms 1025 times, but the “Constitution” is absent both literally and figuratively. The word tax and its forms appears 183 times, fee 234 times, and “Internal Revenue” 104 times. Other words like apply, rule, culture, diverse, enforce, provide, authority - all words that appear repeatedly, while a word like “own” appears only 11 times. See the full list below. It is quite telling.

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