I am writing this in support of ideas put forth by Wonkish and Avgio in

http://www.redstate.com/wonkish1/2010/12/28/conservative-innovation-the-long-war/

In a comment there I wrote the following paragraph.

May I suggest you (we) figure out a way to funnel good ideas to policy makers in the GOP. I posted extensively on Newt’s American Solutions Lab. When I started, I was a fan of Gingrich. but there was absolutely no indication that he ever read anything anyone posted and certainly never gave anyone credit for “his” ideas. His staff was also completely indifferent to anything posted there. He is now off my list of candidates I would support in 2012.

I would like to elaborate on my harsh criticism. It is not that I care if my ideas are opposed or even attacked. I thrive on debate. But Newt advertised the Lab as a place  where ordinary citizens could post and discuss possible solutions to national problems.  There was an implication that his staff would actually read the posts and pass many of them on to him for a response. There is no evidence that this ever happened. I don’t think Newt ever posted a single comment in the Lab. Occasionally  his “assistants” would post something but they never engaged in debate.

One of the issues I was passionate about back in 2008 was the “mark-to-market” discussion.  Newt and Steve Forbes were all over the talk shows blaming the rule that assets held by a bank should be valued at the price they could be sold at rather than on the hope that there would be no defaults. They clearly did not understand the issue and ended up pimping for their wall street cronies, whether intentionally or not. Now that is MY opinion. There were many participants in the Lab who vehemently disagreed with me. They forced me to refine and revise my arguments. I can’t say we ever came to a consensus, but it was a respectful disagreement with hundreds of comments. Of course nobody in Newt’s organization deigned to participate. After all, the guru had handed down the truth.

I pressed on. I wrote to various members of Newt’s staff, and to Newt himself. Never a response. I phoned the American Solutions organization and accidentally got a young assistant on the phone. She was actually polite and seemed interested in the topic. She had an “expert” call me to hear out my arguments on mark-to- market.  He seemed interested too.  That was the end of it. No more e mails ; no more returned phone calls. I guess I was  officially a crackpot.

What I most despise about progressives is their smug superiority and unwillingness to brook dissent. Sounds like Newt. Nuff said. To be fair, it also sounds like every GOP leader. Try, just try to get in touch with Palin’s organization, or with any Fox commentator or with Rush, or with Paul Ryan. And those are the ones I most respect.

For a serious conservative issues site to thrive, it needs free-wheeling debate and even dumb ideas. But at some point it needs an actual political leader or commentator to acknowledge the good ideas it distills.

Postscript 1: I would love to read a response from anyone at American Solutions or from a senior staffer for any GOP congress person or potential candidate. Not holding my breath.

Postscript2: Redstate comes closer to the ideal. I’d like to see more issues based discussion, but it is primarily a political site. I think politicians pay attention, but do they really?  I don’t know.

Like it or not, the tax compromise is a done deal. So is repeal of DADT.  The two remaining issues for the lame duck session are the START treaty and the 9/11 responders medical aid bill.

On the 9/11 bill, can’t the GOP leadership offer a clean bill accomplishing the purpose? Normally, it should go through the committee process, and it will next year if a principled alternative can be offered. Please…if only to shut up those smarmy NY Congressmen and Senators.

Obviously START is way more complex and important. It is no exaggeration that a bad treaty could severely damage our security. Why not schedule hearings in January and call as witnesses all the so-called experts on both sides.  It is a constitutional duty for the Senate to really understand every line in a treaty before ratifying it? Treaties trump even  the Constitution.  The Demogogue Party should be forced to defend every word before it is voted on.

In another thread, I owned up to feeling some moral qualms on my opposition to the the dream act. After reading other comments, I must thank my fellow redstaters for teaching me that the golden rule doesn’t apply to Mexican children. There is a lot wrong with the content of the dream act.  But the ferocity of the opposition and the gleeful support for deporting people who have lived their whole lives here exposes a dark side to so-called social conservatism.

When it comes to abortion, I have no doubt that the life of a preborn baby trumps the wishes of the woman carrying him or her in her womb. Even here, I do not feel any joy in the mother’s anguish. Abortion is simply immoral.

I am absolutely committed to secure borders and a strong national defense. But if we cannot prevent a 3 year old from slipping across the border, then we should think twice about deporting her 20 years later. Is the dream act flawed? You bet it is.  But I will not claim any moral high ground for sending an American in every way but birth to a strange country. I pity those who can joke about it.

I know I’m asking for a torrent of insults.

You know, it’s that tingling feeling in your leg when your adversary is gnashing his teeth. It is not really healthy, but like good brandy and a fine cigar, you can enjoy it and repent in the morning.

The question I propose, just for fun, is two-fold. First, Who do you most want to be unhappy?  Second, which individual losses by their candidates or wins by our candidates will inflict the most emotional distress?

Here are my short lists.

Unhappies:

1. The left blogosphere

2. George Soros and the Air America/MSNBC crowd.

3. The  mainstream media

Losing candidates: (Plausible losses only)
Barney Frank, Alan Grayson, Harry Reid, Madam Boxer,
Charlie Crist, Lisa Murkowski

Winning Candidates: (Plausible wins only)

Christine O’Donnell, Sharron Angle, Joe Miller

Note the overlap in Nevada and Alaska.

Last night, Christine O’Donnell was embarrassed when she could not name a bad Supreme court decision.

Every Republican running for any office should know the details of how Suzette Kelo and her neighbors had their property stolen by corrupt officials of New London, CT on behalf of Pfizer. It has been described as Robin Hood in reverse.

Five liberal justices, opposed by Rehnquist, Thomas, Scalia, and O’Connor (!), ratified this  brazen act of theft. The project that Pfizer was supposed to build on the stolen property was abandoned , and the land stands empty as a poke in the eye to anyone who believes in liberty.

The GOP, the Tea Party and all candidates should include this story in every publication and every speech. Nobody is safe from greedy progressives. Nobody!

Tonight, Christine O’Donnell can use this issue to bury the little bald marxist. Up in CT, Linda McMahon can link this to a corrupt Attorney General who thinks poor people have no property rights. Even the NAACP filed a brief on Suzette’s behalf.

Why can’t we get our best issues on the table?  No offense to the Socons, but people are sympathetic to perceived underdogs, like gays—and poor property owners.

Obama’s buddy, Bill Ayers just got dissed by that rarest of creatures—A Kennedy with a real job in the private sector.  Comrade Ayers, after an undistinguished career of indoctrinating students to hate everything they should love, has retired (3 cheers). A mean spirited man whose publications amount to little more than a polemic against morality and reason has held a professorship at a publicly funded university for some twenty years. Where has the Board of Trustees, chaired by Mr. Kennedy, been all this time? Now that he is leaving, they deny him the honorific “emeritus”. Good for them. Not a single yes vote.

“I intend to vote against conferring the honorific title of our university to a man whose body of work includes a book dedicated in part to the man who murdered my father, Robert F. Kennedy. There is nothing more antithetical to the hopes for a university that is lively and yet civil, or to the hopes of our founding fathers for their great experiment of a self-governing people, than to permanently seal off debate with one’s opponents by killing them.”

Luckily there are no other professors at publicly funded institutions who would cheer at the destruction of all things American, or at the murder of even a liberal politician.

Who first said it?  As best I can tell it first appeared in a typing book.
But it seems like good advice for the GOP and conservatives.

The highest priority is to take the House, ridding the country of the worst Speaker in history.
The next is to take the Senate. The next is to defeat Harry Reid.

The tea party wing is justifiably feeling proud of what it has accomplished so far. But without
winning in November, it is merely a footnote to history.

Neither group of Republicans can succeed without the other. The moderates, aka RINOs, can’t win
in California if Conservatives stay home. The Conservatives, aka ideologues, can’t win in Nevada if the moderates stay home.

Both sides should join hands and sing kumbaya at the prospect of sending Boxer and Reid to the
phantom zone.

The Tea Party will be judged by how well all its candidates do in November. Especially Sharron
Angle, Mark Rubio, Joe Miller, Christine O’Donnell, Rand Paul, and Nikki Haley. But if Kelly
Ayotte loses in or NH Mark Kirk loses in IL, it will severely curtail our ability to show what
conservative government can accomplish. Please don’t take my omission of other candidates in a negative way. These are only examples.

The entire Conservative movement will be judged by how Chris Christie and other new governors
perform in the next few years. If we do take back Congress, that will be judged as well.  Like it
or not, there are no permanent majorities in America. Trust and confidence must be earned over
and over.

To Limbaugh, Levin, Hannity, Beck, Ingraham, Erickson, and all conservative commentators and
bloggers : Bite your tongue before the word RINO emerges from your lips or your keyboard between
now and November second. I cringe when I see Redstate bloggers attacking Palin or Coburn or
Cantor for not being conservative enough or for endorsing the wrong candidate.

To Rove, O’Reilly, Gingrich, and the whole GOP establishment: Forget the inside baseball and the
wheeling and dealing for two months. If any of you seem responsible for close losses you-know-
where, you will never sell another book to conservatives (Ahh, capitalism).

I hope to write a Part 2 describing how I think we can help our candidates win with hard-hitting
clear concrete proposals. Make the Democrats the Party of No and ruin the next decade for the
entire pompous power hungry progressive mob seeking to enslave us.

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Before sharing my latest effort at humor, allow me to ask (if nobody has asked yet) whether the progressives and their Islamo-fascist allies are now ok with depicting the M person in cartoons? After all, it is protected by the First Amendment, and at worst may be offensive to a few bigots and extremists. Just wondering…

Rahm Emmanuel is smart and ruthless. Barak Obama is a narcissistic politician. That doesn’t really inform us on the correctness of their policy ideas. But it does give us some insight on the scheming which may explain their tactics. Why did Rahm let the President jump into Mosque-Gate with no apparent thought of the short term political impact?

Here is one possible explanation. Unless it actually is confirmed by events, there is no way to know if it is true, but what the heck, conspiracy theories are fun to contemplate.

Imagine the White House brain trust contemplating the downward spiral in the polls and the November, 2010 elections. Imagine Obama, Emmanuel, and Axelrod in what they think is a private conversation. Twenty years later, during the Emmanuel Administration, the record has been unsealed and on a White House tour by a group of interns in 2031, the truth is shown on a hologram.

“We bleepin need a bleepin public relations coup to convince the bleepin voters that you are a great bleepin leader, sir.”

“That’s what you said about the BP spill. How did that work out for us?”

“Those dumb bleepin Brits let us down. They bleepin assured me they would have that bleepin hole capped in a bleepin week or two. “

“Yeah…and I came across looking like a bleepin putz. Am I using “putz” correctly, Rahm?”

“Yeah, yeah….exactly right— but this time I have a bullet proof plan.”

(Axelrod rolls his eyes and seems to be cringing, but says nothing.)

Flashing that winning dead fish smile, Rahm in a low voice reveals that

“My guys have the goods on that bleepin Imam. He’s a bleepin alcoholic and we have compromising pictures of him with a slutty Jewish blond Obama girl. You know who I mean…her bleepin father is a huge bleepin contributor. Now she is too.”

After the chuckles die down, Axelrod asks sarcastically how that will be useful.

Rahm thinks “What a bleepin moron!” but says, let’s have the chief seem to make an ill considered statement of support for the bleepin mosque.”

Looking up from some travel brochures, the Commander in Chief asks timidly “how will that help?”

“Please pay attention sir. I told you that Aruba is just too close to Venezuela. Tomorrow night at that bleepin Ramadan dinner, tell them you support the mosque because that’s what James Madison would have wanted. Then, after the weekend, back off and tell New Yorkers you understand their concern that it might be hurtful to the bleepin relatives of the 9/11 victims”. (Axelrod looks aghast)

Glaring at Axelrod, “Now here’s the payoff. In return for keeping his secrets, the bleepin Imam will visit the White House for a root beer summit and the two of you will emerge with an agreement to build the mosque up in bleepin Harlem. Two statesmen showing the world how Islam truly is a religion of peace and tolerance. You won’t reveal the secret agreement to ship some F15s to Hamas until after the elections”

“Is Tahiti too close to China? Hey…I’m the bleepin President. Don’t look at me that way.”

Axelrod pipes up, “That just might work, Rahmmy.”

And that boys and girls is how the Imam and President Obama became such good friends. Look at the time! We have to hurry out to the Rose Garden. They’re stoning a right wing transgendered lesbian at noon.

In no particular order…

Things I knew before the 2008 elections:

1. Obama and his progressive crowd are socialists and communists. They only differ in  where they are in the authoritarian/totalitarian spectrum.

2. Progressives despise democracy, free speech, the rule of law,  and freedom except if they are killing preborn babies or keeping violent criminals and illegal immigrants from being prosecuted.

3. They favor a privileged class of self-proclaimed intellectuals to govern. Of course this elite group is not subject to the same rules as the rest of us. They consider most Americans to be unfit for self-governing.

4. The managers who are responsible for producing the goods and sevices needed by the intelligentsia are entitled to a decent living but should not expect much more than a hamburger flipper. The only well paid people should be  the intellectuals and the workers who are represented by a politically connected unions. And oh yeah, entertainers too.

Things I expected to be true but have been confirmed since the 2008 election:

5. They are intent on betraying our friends and appeasing our enemies.

6. They want to cripple our national defense.

7. Obama’s middle east policy is set by J-Street.

8. Sarah Palin is my favorite politician.

Unexpected things I have learned since the 2008 election:

9. Obama is neither intelligent nor knowledgable.

10. Obama’s appointees have been almost entirely chosen for political reasons, with little attention paid to their qualifications for the job. They are bad philosophically and also incompetent. Maybe that’s better than bad and competetent

11. The Progressives are finding it ever harder to hide their anti-semitism and anti-Christian views. Oddly, they seem unafraid of Sharia law.

12. Fair to a fault, progressives see no reason why we should have nuclear weapons but deny them to Iran or N. Korea.

13. Chris Cristie is awesome.

14 America is on the road to  bankruptcy.

I could go on, but I think that explains why I am conservative.

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(Original version is a few years old. I posted it on Newt’s American Solutions last year I think)

Suggestions for improvement are welcome.

Throughout American history, the question of whom to reward with the prize of legal immigrant status, and what to require of them to attain citizenship has been as controversial as any issue facing the nation. At various times, the debate has turned ugly and stirred deeply felt passions. The current debate is no different, though to hear both sides tell it, we are at an unprecedented crossroads, one which will define us as a nation. The truth is probably less exciting, but it remains an important decision transcending the immediate political battles.

There are more than 12 million illegal aliens in the country, and for a variety of reasons this is a bad thing. Broadly speaking there are two camps. One, the amnesty camp, says it is cruel to keep these people in limbo. In return for doing jobs which American citizens allegedly shun, the “guest workers” deserve to be legalized and be given citizenship. The anti-amnesty camp says it would be wrong to reward illegal border crossers for their bad behavior, notwithstanding any contribution they may be making to the American economy. The anti-amnesty folks are typically fuzzy on the question of whether it would be good to deport any large number of them, but, apart from the merits of deportation, they are frustrated by the difficulty of doing so in a humane manner. They are partly mistaken about this; a fleet of modern air-conditioned buses could easily handle a million or more a year at a cost of a few billion dollars. But finding the deportees and getting them to leave peacefully presents humanitarian issues which would overwhelm law enforcement agencies. So the point is conceded. Mass deportations are not feasible. Nevertheless, there is general agreement among politicians and most citizens that felony convictions or multiple DUI convictions should lead to deportation or prison.

Hardly anyone opposes secure borders with humane enforcement, if only to block terrorists from entering. The proposed and partially built security fence seems like a cost effective way to block most illegal entry from Mexico. One can only conclude that opponents of the fence are not serious about controlling that border.

It is an open question whether illegals contribute more to the economy than they use in services provided to them as if they were citizens. Since most of them have children in school, and pay little or no more taxes beyond the payroll taxes withheld by employers, it is safe to say that claims of a net positive contribution are at least highly suspect. These very payroll taxes are often cited as evidence that they are helping to pay for retirement benefits of Americans and how unfair it is that they are not then going to be eligible for benefits. But tax money is fungible, so this is a specious consideration if they are not paying enough taxes to cover current benefits.

For some twenty years, since the last general amnesty, it has been illegal to employ illegal immigrants. That law is virtually never enforced except to deny presidential appointments to high profile women with illegal nannies. It is hard to jail someone just for hiring poor people.

We are at an impasse. We want to control the borders. We wish most of the illegal immigrants would go home and wait in line for a chance to immigrate legally, but we can’t bring ourselves to round them up and deport them. We won’t jail the employers who hire them. What can we do to encourage voluntary repatriation? The answer lies in the fact cited above that employers seem perfectly happy to withhold payroll and other taxes prescribed by law. Why obey the tax laws yet ignore the illegality of the employment? Could it be that the tax laws are actually enforced? Tax evasion may be rampant among individuals, but not among businesses. It is reckless to risk a profitable business by failing to withhold taxes. The Government will catch you and put you in jail for that.

Maybe we can harness the resources of the IRS to help solve the illegal immigration problem. Suppose that employers were free to hire all the illegals they want. Give the illegals legitimate social security numbers. End the traffic in fake ones by designing forgery-resistant cards. Then simply have employers pay a payroll tax surcharge for each illegal hired. For the sake of argument, set it at a minimum of $5.00 per hour. Let it increase in proportion to the wages paid to the employee. Suddenly there will appear Americans willing to do the jobs that, well, Americans just won’t do. True you may have to pay them more than you pay an illegal, but maybe not $10,000 a year more. If that isn’t enough, set it at $10 an hour or more. Let the states put on a surcharge to help defray their own expenses. A flexible mechanism for setting the surcharge will allow it to fluctuate according to current conditions of domestic employment or whatever other criteria the President or his designee deem appropriate, but always above a statutory floor. Without jobs, the illegal population will gradually shrink on its own.

Now let any illegal immigrant who is gainfully employed for, say, five or more years be allowed to get legal status. The fifty thousand dollars or more paid by the employer proves the value of this individual to the economy. Indeed, if a recent electrical engineering PhD from an American University wants to remain here, the tax surcharge isn’t much disincentive for an employer. Automatically, the best educated potential immigrants will be favored. This more educated group is likely to be fluent in English, anxious to assimilate themselves and their children, and motivated to become loyal citizens.

All proposals to control our borders require tamper-proof identification, and some level of physical border control. Once the economic incentive to cross the border illegally is removed, agents will be able to concentrate on stopping potential terrorists or other enemies.

It sure sounds like a win/win plan except for the individuals and businesses who are now pocketing the benefits of cheap illegal labor. So it may be naïve to think that Congress and the President will embrace this plan. But let them stop saying that there is no simple alternative to mass deportation or amnesty.