Amending the U.S. Constitution is so hard that we have only done it 27 times in our history, and only 17 times in U.S. histroy if you consider the first 10 as an initial corrective by the founders themselves. Out of frustration, some ask the question:

Should we support having a constitutional convention?

Short answer: NO! An open-ended rewrite of the Constitution permits few opportunities for improvement but has far to many opportunities for mischief and disimprovement, especially with near-majorities of Americans unmoored by the brilliant understanding of limited Federal Government embedded in the Constitution. We have in some ways been saved by the very limitations of the document from further Government-expanding experiments.

As one commenter put it: “There is nothing wrong with our Constitution. The problem is with our politicians, and with the lazy citizenry who refuse to vote them out when they consistently violate that Constitution.”

However, the challenge of getting around the Congressional roadblock on Amendments that curtail the Congress (such as term limits) is a real one. So one very good idea did bubble up out of the discussion:

I would prefer to add a 3rd method of Amendment: If 3/4ths of the States pass an identical Resolution of Amendment within a fixed time window, then that Amendment is placed before the voters at the next Congressional election for ratification, majority vote.

This bypasses Congress when necessary, and strengthens the hand of the States with respect to the Federal Government.

I would propose the language thusly:

State-initiated Constitutional Amendment Process

When 3/4ths of the States have passed in their respective legislatures identical Resolutions of Amendment within the prior 7 year period, the proposed Amendment in that Resolution of Amendment shall be placed before the voters of all the States at the next Congressional election for their approval, in the form of a ballot referendum.

Such an Amendment shall be deemed to have passed the referendum under the condition where a majority of elector-equivalent votes are counted for the proposal, such elector-equivalent votes having been counted as follows: In each district or State where a number of electors are chosen for President, that number is used as the number of elector-equivalent votes. These elector-equivalent votes are considered for or against the Amendment referendum, depending on whether a majority of ballots cast by voters in that given district or State are for or against the proposed Amendment respectively.

Any such Amendment, having been approved through the above process, shall be valid to all Intents and Purposes, as Part of this Constitution.

This itself is a Constitutional Amendment. Which means it needs to get through Congress. However, since it is generic, clean, and pro-Federalism and supportive of ‘we the people’, it should garner wide support.

I honestly thought it was satire when I read first that President Obama won the Nobel Peace prize. How absurd! A formerly important international prize has now reached the nadir of irrelevent tom-foolery by giving the current President an ‘affirmative action’ Nobel Peace Prize he did nothing to earn. What has he done lately other than embolden violent enemies and lost Olympic bids? It was just last week was satirized by SNL for lack of accomplishments, but the ignoble Nobel clowns didn’t get the memo.

Even the UK Times calls says: absurd decision on Obama makes a mockery of the Nobel peace prize, saying: “Sadly, it seems they have so bedazzled the Norwegians that they can no longer separate hopes from achievement. The achievements of all previous winners have been diminished.” The mockery made more notable for the fact that “The deadline for nominations was February 1, meaning Obama was nominated after being in office for just 11 days.” National Review notes:

Every year since 1901, the peace prize has been given by a committee of five Norwegians. They are appointed by the Norwegian parliament, the Storting. The Nobel Peace Prize always reflects the consensus of Norwegian politics. And that consensus is, in a word — a word the Norwegians might well choose — “progressive.” Others might call it left-wing.

The Nobel peace prize has gone off the rails into the deep end of left-wing identity politics and absurd peace awards before (Arafat, Gore, Carter, the fraud Rigobeto Menchu, etc.) Yet now, they are no longer even tethered to the excuse of some accomplishment. All this is about is how un-Bush Obama is, and how he makes the left feel. The Nobel Peace Prize has become the “un-Bush Prize” for the public figure these 5 Norwegians think is least like George W Bush.

The committee has said, “Only very rarely has a person to the same extent as Obama captured the world’s attention and given its people hope for a better future.”

Really. Which hope? Is it the $13 trillion in deficits? The 4 million jobs lost since Obama was inaugurated? Or simply the hope of leftists that American supremacy is kaput and America is choosing to decline, and free market capitalism took a beating in the past year?

They said: “In the past year Obama has been a key person for important initiatives in the U.N. for nuclear disarmament and to set a completely new agenda for the Muslim world and East-West relations.”

Really. They say this just a week after a vicious attack by the Taliban in Afghanistan left 8 Americans killed. Two weeks after Iran announced more about their nuclear program (which we’ve known about since 2006).

The more things change the more things stay the same. Again this year - Five Norwegian Idiots Pick Another Leftist.

Perhaps I am wrong in the headlines. Perhaps it should be Five Norwegian Leftists Pick Another Idiot. It’s unclear whether this was stupidity or just leftist In any case, it would be useful to get the names of the members of the Nobel committee, to understand exactly who came up with this inspired bit of late-night comedy material.

Another thought: Bill Clinton surely is steamed right about now. Think about it. The logical name to pick, had Hillary won the past election, would have been Bill Clinton for the Nobel “un-Bush” prize as a celebration of her election.

The Baucas ObamaCare bill text is out. It should be known as America’s Death of Healthcare Freedom Act of 2009. This bill has 250 pages and it’s not even the real legislative language. It’s in English … sort of.

The bill forces people, via multiple mandates and taxes and subsidies, to get people into Government-controlled health insurance:

Personal Responsibility Requirement. Beginning in 2013, all U.S. citizens and legal residents would be required to purchase coverage through (1) the individual market, a public program such as Medicare, Medicaid, the Children‘s Health Insurance Program, Veteran‘s Health Care Program, or TRICARE or through an employer (or as a dependent of a covered employee) in the small group market, meeting at least the requirements of a bronze plan, or (2) in the large group market, in a plan with first dollar coverage for prevention-related services as recommended by the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force – except in cases where value-based insurance design is used and cannot have a maximum out-of-pocket limit greater than that provided by the standards established for HSA current law limit.

The ObamaCare train has been sluggish, but it IS moving forward. Like with Napoleon and Hitler invading Russia, October is the dangerous month. EITHER THEY GET IT DONE IN THE NEXT 6 WEEKS or the agenda starts to freeze in the winter.

The gameplan is out there.

Keep your eye on the vapor bill. Heritage blogs the Democrats’ game plan:

Here is what we know. Sources on K Street and on Capitol Hill have confirmed the following scenario:

1. Senate staffers from the Senate Finance Committee and the Senate HELP (Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee) are in the process of writing the bill RIGHT NOW that the Senate will consider the second full week of October;
2. Senator Reid will have to move to proceed to a House passed tax measure to avoid a “Blue Slip” problem. The term blue slip describes the procedure the House uses to stop the Senate from originating a tax bill. The Constitution states “All Bills for raising Revenue shall originate in the House of Representatives.” The House passed tax measures that are on the Senate Calendar are as follows:
- H.R. 1664 The AIG Bonus Bill;
- H.R. 2751 A tax bill promoting fuel efficient cars;
- H.R. 2454 House passed Global Warming bill; and,
- Any other tax measure that comes from the House in the next few days.
3. Senator Reid uses all the procedural tactics in his toolbox to shut down debate and control the Amendment process to get this Senate debate completed by the end of October. They can add the Public Option as an amendment on the Senate floor with a simple majority if they have the will.

Our sources further tell us that moderate Democrats are experiencing heartburn over the cost aspect of the bill. If the bill gets a big score from the Congressional Budget Office, moderate Democrats in the Senate are going to rebel. Also, the “Read the Bill” movement in the heartland is having an effect inside the halls of the Capitol. This bill is going to come back over to the House and they are going to have to consider taking up and passing the Senate passed bill or bounce it back to the House. Worst case scenario, a bill may be on the President’s desk by November 1st, because the House will have the opportunity to take up and pass the Senate passed bill to get it to the President.

Well, here it comes folks. Consider the serious violations of basic ethical governance happening right now in the Senate’s mad rush to pass ObamaCare:

- The outrageous and unseemly refusal of the Senate under Reid and the Baucus Senate Finance Committee to properly write legislative language and allow people to read bills before voting on it

- The comments of Sen Carper, Sen Kerry and others laughing at the very suggestion that Senators read bills. see Senator Carper: Read the bill, are you kidding me?

- The refusal to take the time to get the bill scored by CBO for cost.

- The bait-and-switch of voting provisions down in committee and using the ‘nuclear option’ of reconciliation to get public option passed.

There are minefields to cross - on the left:

46 Liberal Dems - Medicare plus 5 or no go.

Then there is the taxpayer funding of abortion - an issue brought fully to life with the defeat in the Senate of the Hatch amendment. Consider this Pew Poll: Americans increasingly pro-life but 4 in 10 don’t know Obama’s position on it, while Catholic bishops skeptical of costly and pro-abortion Obamacare provisons.

So what is a conservative activist to do?

1. Read the Text!

2. Make ObamaCare #1 focus of activism in the month of October. It’s time to realize that ‘public option’ is not the full problem and issue with ObamaCare. It’s the - Taxes, mandates, rationing/care restrictions, over-spending, unfunded mandates, Medicare screw tightening, taxpayer funded abortions, illegal aliens covered, job-killing taxes on business, fees and taxes on health insurance plans, and restrictions on health savings accounts. that’s just the Top Ten. Go back to #1 and find more.

3. Fight the nuclear option. It’s an outrageous way to pass a major bill like this.

4. Fight for every vote. A barely-scraping by vote may be enough to derail it, just as the cap&trade vote was a depressent to that agenda.

This is Fourth and Goal for the Obama side. We need to make a fourth and goal defensive effort. Stop every play, every move, make every effort.

Falling prey to the same type of brain cancer that recently took journalist Bob Novak, Senator Ted Kennedy died yesterday.

In his young years, he was overshadowed by his prominent older brothers. He was the weaker brother, lacking Robert’s passion and intensity and Jack’s intelligence and wit. He got kicked out of college for cheating and then used someone to cheat for him to pass the law exam. On the basis of his Presidential brother and his Kennedy political family strength, yet having no real prior experience or accomplishments save for his name, he became in 1962 a young Massachusetts Senator.

Who would have thought that this man would end up as important a member of the Kennedy clan as any other? Yet he did. Ted Kennedy’s near life-long and almost half-a-century career was as a US Senator from Massachusetts, and in that position he has impacted nearly every issue of this whole era.

Ted Kennedy’s lack of discipline in his personal life led to the tragedy of the death of Mary Jo Kopechne. Drunk and with Mary Jo in July 1969, Ted drove off a bridge in Chappaquiddick, submerging his car; he escaped from the sunken car, but instead of seeking help to save her life he ran and swam away. His actions killed Mary Jo, and it took remarkable control of the media and the local judicial process by his powerful family to coverup his true crime and save his political career. In the end, it would doom his chances for the Presidency when, in 1980, he was simply unable to account for and explain his actions. Scandal didn’t leave him. He was accused of using drugs in the 1980s and in 1991 was caught up in the date-rape charge made against his nephew.

Kennedy’s legacy politically will be his actions for 45 years on the Senate floor. Admired so much by liberals, he became for them the ‘lion’ of the Senate. To Ted Kennedy, Federal Government was the hammer and every social issue was the nail. His political legacy, like his personal one, is one of undisciplined liberalism. Unmoored by constraints of fiscal discipline or policy constraints of asking whether Government programs are effective, efficient and worthwhile.

Kennedy pushed through a 1965 immigration bill, predicting wrongly that it would not
Greatly change or expand immigration:

“First, our cities will not be flooded with a million immigrants annually. Under the proposed bill, the present level of immigration remains substantially the same … Secondly, the ethnic mix (of the country) will not be upset…” — Kennedy, speaking in the Senate in favor of his 1965 Immigration and Naturalization Act.

Kennedy was wrong. The immigration bill’s impact was huge, and it helped spawn the ongoing endemic problems of illegal immigration while radically shifting the types of immigrants that come to America.

Kennedy wrongly predicted when the oil and gas prices were being decontrolled in 1981 that priced would skyrocket. The opposite happened. In the 1980s, the price of oil fell as previously high prices put demand down and the new OPEC supplies overwhelmed demand.

Kennedy incited the era of “Borking” and ugly Supreme Court nomination politics with his inflammatory and slanderous charges against Robert Bork on the Senate floor. The truth would not suffice to defeat Bork, So Kennedy scare-mongered against Bork:

Robert Bork’s America is a land in which women would be forced into back-alley abortions, blacks would sit at segregated lunch counters, rogue police could break down citizens’ doors in midnight raids, schoolchildren could not be taught about evolution, writers and artists could be censored at the whim of the Government, and the doors of the Federal courts would be shut on the fingers of millions of citizens for whom the judiciary is — and is often the only — protector of the individual rights that are the heart of our democracy….

This was not an outburst but a calculated political slander. Kennedy’s lies worked. What was before that time a mostly rubber-stamp confirmation of Presidential picks, which in turn were in many cases guesswork, became a high-stakes arena for the right and left to duke out to control the interpretation of the Constitution.

At various times, Senator Kennedy has made other inflammatory remarks, for pointed political effect. Just as remarkable has been the restrained and often kind way the targets of his attacks have responded. After Kennedy attacked President G W Bush on the Senate floor, in effect accusing him of starting the Iraq war for oil profits, he was lauded by the GHWBush library for his ‘public service’ as a Senator.

Ted Kennedy over the years added gravitas and accomplishments, mainly by pushing through Government expansion bills. Under President Bush, he wrote (his staff wrote) the No Child Left Behind act. President Bush in effect allowed his domestic agenda to get written by Kennedy. Republicans such as Senator Hatch and Senator McCain worked with Kennedy on ‘bipartisan’ bills.

Ted Kennedy’s true legacy is that of liberalism to excess. He would think nothing of proposing more spending in an era of trillion dollar deficits; he ushered in the era of making political blood sport out of judicial nominations. He would think nothing of tearing down a president for political gain. For good or bad, Ted Kennedy has shaped much of politics today. His legacy? Look to our leviathan Federal Government itself. It’s the house that Ted built.

(Crossposted from Travis Mon http://travismonitor.blogspot.com/2009/08/ted-kennedy-legacy.html )

Rep Doggett’s Town Hall today in Austin, Texas, did NOT Go According to Plan. Cut short by protesters and an attempt to escape met with a group that blocked his car. A posting on the incident at Free Republic has the after-action report:

An angry crowd of an estimated 300 people caused Lloyd Doggett to cut short his “office hours” public appearance in Austin. When asked if he would change his vote on health care if it appeared that his constituents did not want it, he stated that he had to use his judgment and just because a few angry people come out it was no reason to change his vote.

Following that he called an end to the discussion and attempted to leave 30 minutes before the published time. He was followed through the parking lot to his car by constituents chanting “just say no”, His car was blocked and he was delayed leaving.

A Doggett supporter described the incident as “a nasty crowd’

Help us show him how these constituents feel.
The next “office hours” meeting is scheduled for 4pm today at the Bastrop County Courthouse. Make your voice heard.

More reporting on it:

WHAT a good time I had today and I must admit I was on the edges and not starting all the chanting and pressuring. I figure I call his office every day so he hears from me, this time it was little old ladies on walkers and they had never done this before.

Almost all the signs, no socialized medicine, keep your hands off my rights, just say no, pictures of Doggett with big X’s across the face.

There was no sound system, so he could only be heard by 5 people at a time. He was asked if this Health care was going to cover illegal alliens and he said, NO.
they started calling him a”liar” and “read the bill”.

I had a copy of the bill (weighs almost 10 #’s) and they pushed me to the front but I didn’t get to question him.

This protest is one week after anti-ObamaCare counter-protesters out-numbered ACORN types at an AFL-CIO pro-ObamaCare event 2-to-1. Conservative / liberty activists are taking it to the street in Austin.

Crossposted to Travis Monitor

The Obamacare bills in Congress are a clear and present danger to the life, liberty and prosperity of Americans. That’s why I call the Waxman House bill the “Destroy American Freedom Act” and urge everyone to learn about how horrible these bills are. The healthcare ‘reform’ engine is based on myths like the myth of 46 million uninsured, but the lies are getting exposed and the Mask is off with this Rube Goldberg bureaucratic monstrosity. These ObamaCare bills could one day literally kill people.

Here are Ten Ways Obamacare will kill things we hold dear:

1. It kills jobs: It contains small business mandates and higher taxes, including an 8% payroll tax on businesses that don’t offer health insurance, that will make businesses shed jobs and crush a weak employment situation.Previous health care tax hikes have already killed jobs and this will be even worse.
2. It kills choice: choice of employers, employees, self-employed, health providers, hospitals, all will have their choices reduced and eliminated by the bureaucratic morass created by the Federal program. Malkin calls it “The Death of Choice.”
3. It kills innovation.
4. It literally kills via inevitable rationing, which has caused suffering in other ’single-payer’ countries and which Obama has chillingly justified. See “Health rations and you” for a satiric glimpse of the future.
5. It kills productive Americans through higher taxes, pushing top effective tax rates well above 50% in some states, and taxing those who dare to go without expensive mandated health insurance. Is the solution to the uninsured to tax 8 million Americans without health insurance? Even the Washington Post is skeptical of these massive tax hikes.
6. It kills fiscal responsibility: With $1 trillion over ten years and a true cost of $4 trillion, Obamacare ramps up a new $200 billion/year entitlement program that hurtles the Federal Government ever faster to bankruptcy. Claims that it would save long-term health costs are refuted by CBO; it saves no money but adds costs to the Government.
7. It will kill state Government budgets by forcing higher Medicaid costs on states. Says TPPF: It “would hijack Texas’ state budget as part of its government takeover of our health care system” to the tune of $4 billion a year in Texas alone.
8. Over the long-term, it will kill private sector health insurance: The Govt-run health insurance scheme will lead to destruction of private health insurance as the rules and subsidies make it impossible for private health insurance to function in true market-oriented way. It will destroy private health insurance and lead to single-payer.
9. It kills quality care by doctors, bureaucratizing the entire system and cutting quality to cut costs.
10. It kills our freedom: It forbids individual private health insurance outside ‘exchanges’ that are set up to reduce choice in health insurance by channelling people into public care (see #8) - “Individual health insurance coverage that is not grandfathered health insurance coverage under subsection (a) may only be offered on or after the first day of Y1 as an Exchange-participating health benefits plan”; it punishes opting out of health insurance; it outlaws health insurance that doesnt meet burdensome Federal guidelines.

This bill outlaws giving someone a job and only paying a wage for that job. As stated here: “If the government purports to deprive me of my right to contract with a doctor to provide me or my family with healthcare at a price I am freely willing to pay and the doctor is freely willing to accept, that is an act of tyranny warranting open rebellion.”

Ultimately, this bill will kill the health industry as we know it, sending America in a direction where we have fewer rights and choices than even people in socialized healthcare countries. Not that the status quo is great, as both the current system and more government intervention suffer from the same lack of market fundamentals: Little direct-pay natural price controls, barriers to competition, high litigation and regulation costs, massive cost-shifting, excessive system complexity, and not enough consumer responsible and choice. Everything bad about the current system will get worse under ObamaCare. There is an alternative to this nightmare: Put consumers back in control and in responsibility for health care spending.

Stopping this bill may be the last chance we get at having a choice over our healthcare.

Cross-posted at Travis Monitor.

American Spectator calls it in http://www.spectator.org/blog/2008/11/26/defining-libertarianism-down#comment_9117 “Defining Libertarianism down”. It’s a snarky commentary on a Reason article - http://reason.com/news/show/129993.html - that curiously is declaring victory for libertarians in the midst of possibly the greatest retrenchment towards socialism and biggest expansion of Governmental power expansion since, er, the New Deal; after all, the new powers-that-be are all making 1930s analogies.

The snark is well-deserved, since the advance of freedom is basically proxied by the advance of prosperity, the advance of individualism, and cultural trends that Bork called “slouching towards Gomorrah”. Never mind that China’s one party state is more prosperous. The glorification misses the Elephantine Government in the room: Global UN Government; larger Federal powers; no abatement of socialism; education that is worse than ever and consists of further indoctrination into left-multi-cultural follies; ongoing racial spoils. As AmSpec put it: This means that when Obama-Daschle bring socialized medicine to America, I’ll still get to order a chai latte and update my Facebook status to read: “We’re screwed!”

As one key indicator of the tin-ear of libertarian self-congratulations, the Reason article celebrated the legal abortion-on-demand as one of those ‘liberating’ experiences that signalled the advance of libertarianism:

By the end of the 1970s, the Civil Aeronautics Board was in the dustbin of history, sharing much-deserved space with price controls, the reserve clause, and back-alley abortions.

So in their book, liberty is advanced by denying the most fundamental right - life - to the most helpless of humanity, the unborn. Well, doesn’t that beat all. Get thee to a declaration of independence, libertarians!

I’ve come to understand that (l)Libertarians who go around hating social conservatives are like teenagers who diss their parents. Thirty years later, they will find out that they are actually rebelling against the roots of who they really are. I was a teenaged libertarian once, thanks to a well-timed reading of Ayn Rand and others, but as I grew and matured, I understood that freedom unmoored from its foundational moral roots is like a house built on sand. (Matthew 7:26 in case you didn’t know.)

The common complaint from the libertarian side, in discussions about the Republican party, is to get rid of the social conservatives and to view them not as ideological siblings, but as something entirely different, an alien and hostile force. For example, this comment was made at AmSpec on line:

>

“In fact, Republicans today, especially at AmSpec, seem to relish the cultural conservatism of the religious right.”

And why not!?! The most reliable conservatives in Congress are invariably also social conservative Christian members. Check the pedigree of men like Tancredo, Coburn, etc. The Catholic church is standing up for the one fundamental and un-compromisable right - the right to life - while the Libertarian Party wallows the pitiable folly of ‘choice’ to kill humans.
The church also was instrumental in standing up against Communist rule in Poland, helping Solidarity, and thereby putting the cracks in the Soviet empire that made it crumble.

Meanwhile, here is what 30 years of Libertarian Party activism has wrought: Liberal Democrats winning some close elections they would have lost and NOTHING ELSE.

The Natural Law, a concept that grew out of Christian philosophy, is the moral foundation of liberty. Christian underpinnings of conservatism inform us that man is a creature of God and life is sacred, that there is a higher authority besides Government, that there is a right and a wrong and a difference between the two, that the ends do not justify the means, that rules/laws must be followed (”render unto Caesar”), etc.

Libertarians are right to love freedom, are on the correct side of history when it comes to the power and prosperity-generation of free markets and free enterprise. Yet they are wrong to miss the necessary context of freedom for civilization to survive - the moral context. They are wrong to disavow the ancestral values and moral temperment that birthed that concept and gave it shape. The roots of libertarianism are social conservative roots and the soil it grew in was Christian soil.

Also posted at http://travismonitor.blogspot.com/

I live in TX-21, Lamar Smith. He was pro-bailout and votes for too many pork barrel spending bills. Otherwise a good conservative Republican Congressman. He didn’t even draw a Democrat challenger this time around. SAFE.

Since that is quite boring, and I have the 2008 Texas election results handy, let’s look at the other TX districts:

Read More →

I am thrilled to see the ideas that Patrick Ruffini has been putting forward on fixing the party and the “Rebuild the Party” effort:

http://www.rebuildtheparty.com/

My own thoughts on getting back to victory as a party are here:
http://travismonitor.blogspot.com/2008/11/no-place-to-go-but-up-strategy-for.html

My point #1 is “Servant-leadership”

It starts with leadership. We need local leadership and elected officials that
re-engage and re-energize the grassroots. These need to be servant-leaders that show the
way by encouraging broad participation. The model is a ‘big tent’, but it is based on core
principles as the tent poles that brings activists in and energizes them. We need to
re-connect our own leaders with our own base, and need to develop new leaders out of
grassroots by getting broader activist participation.

Without a leader who ‘gets it’ our efforts to rebuilt the party will be valiant but futile.
To that end, I think we need to draft Newt Gingrich to be RNC Chair:

Read More →

“Orwellian” needs to be replaced by “Obamesque” as a description of the Soviet-style misuse of language.

His wealth redistribution plan that he calls a ‘tax cut for 95%’ is sticking in my craw. In 1992, Clinton did his “Clintonesque” think and make a promise he broke soon after the election; the ‘middle class tax cut’ went poof when Clinton said “he tried as hard as he could” but he couldn’t do it after all, because of the deficit (as if we weren’t all aware of how high the deficit was prior to the election).

Obama is more blatant … more … Orwellian. He proposes a Marxist-style redistribution of wealth and calls it a ‘tax cut’.

The recipe for this lie? First, he double-counts and takes credit for Bush tax cuts that he opposed and opposes. Then he adds a welfare payment on top, and THEN he gouges the highest income earners (pushing their total tax rates above 50% in some states). It taxes the top income earners and gives a welfare check (a ‘refund’) to people who don’t pay income taxes. That’s not a tax cut, that’s left-wing progressive income tax redistribution. It’s more Karl Marx than Ronald Reagan.

To misuse terms like “tax cut” like that is …. OBAMESQUE.

This was a reply to Commodore Perry’s diary, that provides a different solution to the problem he identified. He noted the problem that Obama’s pick opened up.

However, I think the DNC is showing how the lack of We the People in the VP nomination process is a big problem. Their party is split, they are facing public catastrophe, and even if Hillary is completely cordial, there will be lingering feelings of distrust and dislike within. That sounds great to conservatives now, but what if it happened to us?

He’s right. The insider vetting process for the VP is very smokey-backroom, and may not always give the best answer for uniting the party, winning the election, and governing. He asks:

Why, then, do we not get a say in an office as important as the nation’s Number Two?

We should open up the process. We know that McCain’s running mate has a potential to be a future ‘annointed’ nominee or President, and so we all are stakeholders. We are stakeholders in the party, yet we have no say. OTOH, it would be messy to have a primary race complicated by a ’second guy is VP’ rule. It overly complicates to have the primary itself burdened with this selection so the solution is apparent: Use the national convention itself as the body that selects the VP.

This will take the conventions out of the informercial realm and back to THE REAL PURPOSE OF CONVENTIONS - SELECTING THE NOMINEE. Primaries select the POTUS nominee, but WHY NOT LET THE CONVENTION VOTE ON THE VP NOMINEE.

There are some ways to ‘control’ the process. First, via a Presidential nominee-approved short list.

For example: McCain could come out and announce that he has found 5 qualified contenders - for sake of argument, let it be Cantor, Portman, Pawlenty, Palin, Romney - to put into nomination. Those 5 could then duke it out for the 2nd spot. Let the best man, or woman, win.

These would all be vetted and placed in nomination on the floor … AND HAVE ROLL CALLS VOTES UNTIL SOMEONE GETS OVER 50% (knocking out the lowest vote getter with each rollcall vote, to break up deadlocks, so we dont have 50 rollcall votes like they had in 1924 Dem convention).

What this will do:

1. Gives the GOP convention goers the ultimate say, showing the grassroots spirit of the party.
2. Makes the GOP convention a truly newsworthy event.
3. “The Wisdom of crowds” will avoid a truly bone-headed pick. (Eagleton, Biden, Quayle were really the best picks?)
4. It could be somewhat controlled via requiring going through a nominations committee that leans on the P nominee, or you could allow nominations from the floor, too, so the Ron Paul lovers could put their guy up etc.

I recount the many reasons Joe Biden (D - Beltway Establishment) is an awful VP pick for Obama in a detailed article here:

http://travismonitor.blogspot.com/2008/08/bad-choice-barack-picks-sub-average-joe.html

In brief, they are: DC insider appointment (steps on change theme); Biden praised McCain and raised experience issue in his run for President; Biden is another liberal (14$ lifetime ACU rating); sub-average Joe has been a plagiarist and academic record inflator; voted for the Iraq war (another line of Obama attack thwarted); age issue off the table (another line of Obama attack thwarted); Biden is a gaffe machine.

There seems to be a GOP consensus that this is a good pick … for us. We dodged a possibly- unifying-Hillary bullet, a real moderate and also someone who would really nail down a midwest state and/or make inrodar

And since this is the FIRST MAJOR DECISION that a potential President can make, we should remind ourselves, and the voters, of what and how it reflects on Obama. Or Omera. Whoever.

Sub-average Joe is right: “The presidency is not something that lends itself to on-the-job training.”

Barack, you’re not ready. Thanks for proving it before the election for us.