By: Repair_Man_Jack (Diary)  |  May 6th at 12:08 PM  | 

Sometimes the first step in building a thing of beauty is to dynamite the ugly, dying strip mall that occupies the real estate you want to build upon. We, the American Conservative Movement can rebuild once the junk gets cleared away. We just have to be ready, and we just have to avoid bailing the Progressives out of their own state-fueled death spiral of non-sustainability.

Brett Stevens of Amerika.org shows us how our society currently fulfills Albert Einstein’s definition of insanity.

Currently, our society is chasing its own tail into the abyss. The books give us certain rules and facts, and we follow those; when that doesn’t work out, we redouble our efforts using the same rules and facts. Like robots, we cannot deviate from our programming because we’ve eliminated the people who can think outside the box.

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By: Repair_Man_Jack (Diary)  |  April 26th at 12:00 PM  | 

In honor of the recent opening of the George W. Bush Presidential Library, Keith Hennessey tells us something about Former US President George W. Bush I never would have read in The New York Times.* He teaches an MBA class at Stanford U and one of the aspiring, bright leading-lights in America’s next colossal mortgage meltdown asked him if George W. Bush was smart. Dumb question. Particularly if the student was a snide liberal hoping Mr. Hennessey would him, haw and duck. Hennessey, to his credit, answered below.

President Bush is extremely smart by any traditional standard. He’s highly analytical and was incredibly quick to be able to discern the core question he needed to answer. It was occasionally a little embarrassing when he would jump ahead of one of his Cabinet secretaries in a policy discussion and the advisor would struggle to catch up. He would sometimes force us to accelerate through policy presentations because he so quickly grasped what we were presenting. I use words like briefing and presentation to describe our policy meetings with him, but those are inaccurate. Every meeting was a dialogue, and you had to be ready at all times to be grilled by him and to defend both your analysis and your recommendation. That was scary.

So George W. Bush, like most sentient, literate human beings, is smarter than the “smart-set” that ridiculed him in the blogs and the newspapers. Does that mean he was good? Does that mean I miss him yet? I’d say he got a bum rap. Like any intelligent person called stupid by Maureen Dowd or Joe Biden, he was pilloried unfairly unless you believe the old saw that it takes one to know one. But no, I can’t say I quite miss George W. Bush. I explain below.

By: Erick Erickson (Diary)  |  April 23rd at 12:13 PM  | 

By now everyone knows all about the GOP’s report on the path forward. In a nutshell, we need to embrace serious structural reform, gay marriage, and open borders. The kids these days hate us, the old folks don’t trust us, and we need to do some poll tested, kid approved things to get everyone to like us again. Next month, the RNC will make a | Read More »

By: Repair_Man_Jack (Diary)  |  April 22nd at 10:12 AM  | 

As reigning monarch over the burgeoning American Empire, Barack Obama finds his schedule jam-packed. He has to prioritize. It’s vital that he not get spread too thin. It’s tough being king, but somehow David “Tax-Day” Axelrod helps keep him straight.

For example: Barack Obama found time to address a yearning nation after the Boston Marathon Terror Attack. He couldn’t find one day for attending Lady Thatcher’s memorial service over in Jolly Old England. Another example: Barack Obama has no time in his busy schedule to visit the suffering town of West, TX where a fertilizer plant went sky-high in a tragic industrial accident. He does, however have plenty of time to !FUNDRAISE! in west Texas. Kieth Koffler gives us his majesty’s priorities below.

President Obama is still not scheduled to visit the devastated community of West, Texas, where an explosion at a fertilizer plant five days ago killed 14 – including 11 emergency responders – and wounded approximately 200 people. Up to 75 homes were damaged, as well as an apartment complex that was decimated. Obama so far has sent prayers and money to the town, but not himself.

By: Brad Jackson (Diary)  |  November 8th at 10:30 AM  | 

On today’s edition of Coffee and Markets, Brad Jackson and Ben Domenech are joined by Daniel Garza to discuss Mitt Romney’s failure with Hispanics, a common ground immigration policy Republicans could support, and how conservatives can appeal to Hispanics to bring them into the party’s coalition.

By: Moe Lane (Diary)  |  October 17th at 01:30 PM  | 

…while at the same time eviscerating Barack Obama. Below are two video clips, and the relevant transcript. I created a shorter and a longer version: some people like the thirty second clips, and some people want the full version for full effect. Also, note that I’ve cut out the bit where Romney hammered Obama for lying about Romney’s contraception position, and the bit where Obama | Read More »

By: Jake (Diary)  |  September 29th at 07:00 AM  | 

As the world watches the goings-on in Syria, one of the most pressing fears is that its stock of chemical weapons might go missing and fall into the wrong hands. Today, we find that our nightmare is coming true. We heard in late August that Syrian rebels claimed to have taken over a base with chemical weapons. Now, Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta has admitted that some of those weapons have gone missing

By: Erick Erickson (Diary)  |  September 20th at 04:30 AM  | 

Last night Fox News broke the story that the mastermind of the attack in Libya had been released from GTMO in 2007 during the reign of George Chimpy McBushitler Halliburton and his evil Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, also known as Barack Obama’s Secretary of Defense Robert Gates. But wait . . . there’s more. The United States had advance warning of the attack and | Read More »

By: Daniel Horowitz (Diary)  |  August 7th at 06:55 PM  | 

Well, Obama is approaching another milestone.  In addition to breaching the $16 trillion debt mark, Obama will earn another gold medal in the Greek Olympics for fiscal insanity.  According to CBO, we will definitely incur another $1 trillion debt this year, ensuring that Obama will become not only the only president to rack up a trillion dollar debt, but the only one to ever do | Read More »

By: Daniel Horowitz (Diary)  |  October 24th at 10:30 AM  | 

Amidst the hype concerning the so-called era of austerity and budget cuts, the national debt is rapidly marching towards the $15 trillion milestone.  As of late last week, the national debt stood at $14.94 trillion.  For those of you keeping score, that number has grown by $646 billion since the debt ceiling was raised on August 2, as part of the great bipartisan Budget Control | Read More »

By: Moe Lane (Diary)  |  September 5th at 01:00 PM  | 

Jonathan Chait really, really, really wants liberals to not notice that President Obama is no George W Bush. How much does he want it? He wants it badly enough to jettison the entire idea of the Imperial Presidency (don’t worry: Chait and the rest will start grousing about it again on, say, January 20, 2013). Nope, it’s not Barry Obama’s fault that he couldn’t spin | Read More »

By: Brad Jackson (Diary)  |  September 1st at 10:02 AM  | 

Download Podcast | iTunes | Podcast Feed On today’s edition of Coffee and Markets, Brad Jackson and Ben Domenech are joined by Paul Bonicelli to discuss Dick Cheney’s new book, In My Time, how it portrays other members of George W. Bush’s administration and what it means for Cheney’s legacy. We’re brought to you as always by BigGovernment and Stephen Clouse and Associates. If you’d | Read More »

By: Neil Stevens (Diary)  |  August 29th at 02:00 PM  | 

I mentioned recently that broader polling pools favor Democrats, so when a big new poll of adults comes out from Gallup that shows Barack Obama to be in trouble, I take notice.

By: Daniel Horowitz (Diary)  |  August 15th at 08:38 AM  | 

Watching Governor Rick Perry’s speech at the Red State Gathering, I was struck by the degree to which conservatism has grown at the highest levels of electoral politics, including presidential elections, over the past decade. Twelve years ago, another Texan, George W. Bush, announced his presidential bid by ushering in a new era of conservatism.  At the time, following the longest Republican exile from the | Read More »

By: Neil Stevens (Diary)  |  July 9th at 02:30 AM  | 

Friday, Friday, Friday. Black Friday? Net Neutrality rules have become one step closer to official as the FCC finally delivered something to the OMB after months of stalling. Verizon, MetroPCS, Virginia AG Ken Cuccinelli, and others ended up unable sue to throw out the illegal power grab until it’s published, so the longer the FCC waited, the longer everyone else had to wait to begin | Read More »