How many of you have heard that the Democrats are just totally out-raising Republicans here in the primaries?

Yeah, you have Hillary with a hundred gazillion! You have Obama with a hundred gazillion, and the Republicans are just being swamped with fundraising?

I’ve heard those stories — and, of course, I know exactly why that is.

Republican donors are waiting ’til there’s a nominee.

It’s just that simple.

To confirm it, from the New York Times today:

“When it comes to fund-raising, Democrats have outpaced Republicans almost across the board. The lone exception is the Republican National Committee, which reported yesterday that it had raised $83 million for the year, easily topping the Democratic National Committee, which had raised $50.5 million in the first 11 months of 2007. Republicans say that this cash pile — the Republican committee has $17.2 million on hand, compared to the $2.8 million the Democratic committee reported — should help the Republican presidential nominee in the fall.”

Yep. No question…

The media wants Huckabee, and the reason the media wants Huckabee is because they know they’re going to, down the road, be able to portray him as a nutcase, Bible-thumping evangelical who’s going to take his religion and God into the Oval Office — and they’ll use that to incite fear among liberals and progressives and so forth… They built McCain up. McCain loved it when they built him up. They tripped him up over the war, and now they’re trying to revive his campaign again.

If somebody told you that a conservative was someone who supported amnesty for illegal aliens, who supported limiting free political speech (McCain-Feingold) who embraced the ACLU’s brief for terrorist detainees getting US constitutional rights. If someone told you that a conservative is someone who opposed tax cuts during the Bush administration, and has recently confirmed he would do it again, what would you say?

Most likely you would say, “Hell no! That’s not a conservative.” Yet I just described to several of Senator McCain’s positions over the years. Now, the idea that he’s a great conservative in this race is an affront to conservatives.

They’re pushing McCain hard now. They were waiting to see what happened. Now they’re pushing. They are willing, the Media, are willing to tolerate his position on Iraq in exchange for all of his other views: opposition to tax cuts, limiting free speech, siding up with the ACLU. These are things they’re willing to tolerate in McCain as they overlook his position on Iraq — and, really, they don’t have to overlook much because his position on Iraq isn’t all that different from Rudy or Thompson.

In terms of electing a president, there are a couple things the president can do about abortion, one of them substantive, the other is somewhat ephemeral. The substantive thing that a president can do about abortion is to nominate judges, primarily Supreme Court justices.

That’s it.

Now, a president can lead, a president can try to inspire and motivate, change hearts and so forth, but, in a substantive way, there’s not much a president can do about abortion. There are some people who will overlook every aspect of Governor Huckabee that is really something in total opposition to most of their beliefs, because all they will see is the Christian characteristic, particularly if it fits right with the abortion issue.

Now, my friends, I advocate conservative principles here, which I will not throw away to embrace any candidate. I don’t support open borders and amnesty, as does Governor Huckabee. I don’t support the release of hundreds of criminals. I don’t support repeated increases in taxes. I don’t support national health care.

I don’t care what you call it, whether it’s in the name of the children or not. I don’t support anti-war rhetoric that sounds as if it was written by Nancy Pelosi.

Too much is at stake here!

Now, I don’t want somebody in the White House who has no problem with abortion. I don’t want anybody in the White House who thinks that it’s okay and that we ought not do anything about it.

Don’t misunderstand.

But I also don’t want anybody to misunderstand what a president can actually do about it and how far a president can actually take the issue.

It’s about judges, if your concern is overturning Roe vs. Wade. If it’s not, if you realize that’s going to be a ways down the line and yet we want to do something about abortion prior to that then it’s about changing minds and hearts.

There are several ways of going about doing that, and one of the ways is not wagging your finger in people’s faces and telling them they’re sinning or telling them they’re wrong, you’re just going to seal their resolve against you. I think we’re in the process of changing minds and hearts. I think abortion figures are falling. I think as generations grow and change, there’s a greater repugnance attached to the whole practice. It is not an 80% majority issue, pro-choice isn’t. It’s not even 50% now. Progress is being made on this.

But I’m not going to sit here and put aside all of these things that I believe in.

One of the most frustrating things to me, about this entire Republican primary, is sitting out there right in front of us for all of us to see. I don’t care how far you want to go back, if you want to go back to Buckley and Russell Kirk, if you want to go back to Edmund Burke, if you want to go back to Goldwater, you can do that and you can find how conservatism has positively influenced change in this country.

But all you have to do, if you don’t want to go that far back, all you gotta do is go back to 1980. Now, I realize a lot of people get sick and tired of hearing about Ronald Reagan because there isn’t another Reagan out there. Reagan was a unique individual and so forth. I’m not pining away for somebody to be Ronald Reagan. What I am asking some Republican to see is that Ronald Reagan won two landslides coming off of a Jimmy Carter four years of malaise. Following Ronald Reagan, in 1994 we took back the House of Representatives: the first time in 40 years, and we did this with conservative principles.

What frustrates me is why the latest current crop of Republicans wants to ignore that and think that there’s a better way, when the evidence that shows progress, both economic, social, you name it, national security, defeating the Soviets in the Cold War, it’s all there. And why it is eschewed, why it is ignored in different ways, starting in the early days of this primary campaign…

Why?

My largest concern is how conservatism is going to be redefined so as to fit whatever the current crop of candidates said it is. There’s a bunch of these guys running around saying they’re Reagan.

None of them are.

There’s not one Reagan conservative — well, I can’t say there’s not one, there may be one. The point is, that the lessons are clear on whatever issue you want to raise: national security, taxes, economics, individual prosperity, domestic security. It’s all there: How to beat liberals; how to beat Democrats; how to take power from them.

It’s all there.

Ask me to compromise my principles…

You want to compromise yours, fine, but don’t ask me to make you feel better by joining you.

You have to know, as I do, how to parse the words of Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton and their advisors.

There’s a story in the New York Sun by Josh Gerstein:

“2,600 Pages of Clinton Records Withheld — The National Archives is withholding from the public about 2,600 pages of records at President Clinton’s direction, despite a public assurance by one of his top aides last month that Mr. Clinton ‘has not blocked the release of a single document.'” That’s Bruce Lindsey. Quote:

Bill Clinton “has not blocked the release of a single document.”

That’s true! He’s blocked the release of 2600 documents! This is how you have to read them. He didn’t lie. Bruce Lindsey did not lie. Bill Clinton hasn’ta single” document. blocked the release of “

He blocked the release of 2600!

… facts do matter, I say again….

Once again, unintended consequences are backfiring on environmentalist nuts and alarmist.

Corn prices are through the roof, but it’s not because of food. It’s because of biofuels. “The US Congress overwhelmingly approved yesterday a bill raising fuel efficiency standards for the first time since 1975, offering massive support for biofuels in an effort to slash US dependence on foreign oil.”

Now, we had a story before: wheat prices are at an all-time high.

Then the UN had a story about food shortages, a worldwide food shortage

— and do you know why?

Biofuels!

So much agricultural land is now being devoted to this fad, biological fuels, ethanol and all this (forgive me, Iowans) that they’re not producing as much corn and wheat, food staples, and the price is skyrocketing of course because there’s less of it for food.

So even the UN, which has a branch that’s peddling the global warming hoax, which is urging the use of biofuels and all these alternatives, sees it.

I want to see you get on an airplane and go 600 miles an hour with a propeller or windmill on top of it. These people, I feel so sorry for them in Oklahoma. Some of them still are without power, in the dead of winter, in the middle of “global warming,” with it nowhere in sight, and this is exactly what the environmentalist nuts want!

They want coal-fired power plants shut down. This would be the practical effect. The UNbiofuels are causing a shortage of food. on the other hand says that

I’ll tell you what this is, this CAFE standards, this energy bill, this global warming.

All this stuff is reminiscent — it’s taking a little bit longer to occur, but it’s reminiscent — of the knee-jerk reaction to the Dubai Ports Deal. There was no thinking about the Dubai Ports Deal. That was strictly jingoism. That was, “Oh, my God! Dubai? Arabs? Terrorists? Ports? Nooooo!”

They were screaming bloody murder, Democrats and Republicans, trying to be the first to race to the microphones saying, “It isn’t going to happen,” when in fact it was harmless.

But nobody cared about the details.

Ignorance, folks…

Ignorance is the most expensive commodity we pay for in this country, and this whole energy bill, the emphasis on biofuels and alternative energy sources?

No focus on nuclear, no focus on more petroleum, no focus on the things that produce energy and a growing economy.

Nothing! This is irresponsible.

It’s absolutely stupid, and it’s made possible by the ignorance of a bunch of people who think that we’re in a crisis that we are not in — and if you want to see the future exactly as the environmentalist nuts and these nerds at the UN have in mind, take a look Oklahoma during the ice storm, and if you think I’m exaggerating…

wake up… reality check…

What do you get if you put coal-fired power plants out of business with nothing to replace them? If you’re not going to go nuclear, if you’re not going to use oil and petroleum products and you’re not going to use fossil fuels, what are you going to do?

Sorry, folks, we’re not there yet — and no act of Congress is going to get us there.

Necessity is the mother of invention.

Now, this is a heartwarming story.

“It’s Christmastime at Camp Taji, and Army Staff Sgt. Jared DeAtley looks traumatized, but not by the war outside the camp or holidays away from home. It’s only 9 a.m., and the mail warehouse already has called. ‘Come get the mail,‘ said DeAtley, who’s from Fleming County, Ky., shaking his head.

Those calls have been coming earlier and more emphatically lately. The daily mail pickup by Battery B, 2nd Battalion, 138th Field Artillery, a National Guard unit from Carlisle, Ky., easily fills the bed of a Chevy Silverado, sometimes twice.

With the holidays approaching, the volume of mail headed to service members in Iraq has skyrocketed.

In one 24-hour period last week, 788,473 pounds of mail came into Iraq… Compare that with a 24-hour period in July, when soldiers received a mere 294,808 pounds.

For the 2-138, the sheer volume — Xboxes and iPods from family, treats and cards from well-wishers they’ve never met — prompts them to deny adamantly that they need anything. Once, after the unit arrived in August, some soldiers mused that they’d like soft toilet paper and a bag of Werther’s Original. They received crates of fluffy rolls and 40 bags of hard caramel candy.”

The holidays are bringing in an avalanche of mail for the troops!

But how can this be?

I thought the American people hated the war. I thought the American people hated our troops. They hated the war, at least.

That’s what Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi keep telling us, that Americans are totally against this.

REFERENCE:
• McClatchy Newspapers: Holidays Bring Avalanche of Mail for Troops