AMERICAN CONSERVATISM IN 2008 AND BEYOND

You and others presumed things not yet factual,

Now, I want you to show me where I charged you with racism during the campaign?

Another historic event on November 5
Patriots are making last minute arrangements to go to Washington DC for a rally on the steps of the Capitol started by Rep. Michele Bachman. She will then lead these Patriots through the halls of Congress. I hope the media covers this.

ican, You are an idiot!

There's a huge difference between government mandate to purchase insurance, and government control of health care.

You are one stupid dude!

http://unabridged.merriam-webster.com/cgi-bin/unabridged?va=mandate&x=21&y=9
Main Entry: 1man·date
...
3 a : an authoritative command, order, or injunction : a clear instruction, authorization, or direction
...

http://unabridged.merriam-webster.com/cgi-bin/unabridged?va=control&x=21&y=8
Main Entry: 1con·trol
...
4 a (1) : to exercise restraining or directing influence over : REGULATE, CURB <control one's anger> <controlling her interest in the enterprise> (2) : have power over : RULE <a single company controls the industry>
...

NY-23 and the blame game
(By Ben Pershing, The Washington Post, November 5, 2009)

As top Republicans busily gloated Wednesday over the party's convincing victories in New Jersey and Virginia, there was one GOP leader who wasn't holding any press conferences -- Rep. Pete Sessions (Texas).

As chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee, Sessions was the man in charge of keeping New York's 23rd district in the GOP column, where it's been for more than a century. But Democrat Bill Owens managed to win the seat instead, besting Conservative candidate Doug Hoffman and thereby marring Republicans' otherwise triumphant storyline.

So how much was Sessions really to blame for the saga in upstate New York, where Republican nominee Dede Scozzafava dropped out under pressure from conservatives and ended up endorsing Owens? Interviews with several GOP lawmakers and party strategists Wednesday suggested that Sessions' colleagues don't hold him liable for what happened Tuesday night, but the result in New York did yield lessons that the NRCC and the party as a whole should heed going into 2010.

"I think the mistake here would be to savage the committee or waste time worrying about this," said Rep. Tom Cole (Okla.), who preceeded Sessions as NRCC chairman.

First, there's one point on which Sessions and his colleagues all agree -- the candidate selection process in New York is flawed. Rather than picking their nominee via a competitive primary, the county GOP chairmen from the district got together at a pizza parlor to decide on the party's candidate amongst themselves. They chose Scozzafava, and a disgruntled Hoffman ended up running on the Conservative party line. A similar process occurred before the special election Republicans lost earlier this year in New York's 20th district.

"After two special elections in New York, there is no doubt in my mind that the candidate selection process lacks openness and transparency and should be changed to a primary system so voters can have a say in who their respective parties nominate," Sessions said in a statement Wednesday.

Rep. Steve LaTourette (R-Ohio) made the same point about how Scozzafava was picked. "The NRCC didn't have anything to do with it," he said. "There should have been a primary."

But blaming the process masks the fact that House Republicans were split on this contest right from the start, with the leadership and many moderates backing Scozzafava and conservatives gravitating toward Hoffman. So members from different wings of the party chose to draw different lessons from Tuesday's debacle.

"If Dede had gone through a primary she might not have faced such opposition," said Rep. Mike Simpson (R-Idaho), advancing the theory that Scozzafava really may have been the best candidate for the seat.

Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa), a prominent conservative, drew the opposite conclusion -- if Hoffman had been the candidate all along, he would have prevailed. "I'm disappointed in how it turned out but to even come this close was phenomenal," he said.

Cole said that "by the end, the conference was united behind the only candidate that could win. ... I think the NRCC played the cards it was dealt."

Privately, some party strategists said there were ways to second-guess the performance of Sessions and the NRCC. Could they have done a better job convincing the county chairs to pick a different candidate? Could they have talked more national conservatives into either backing Scozzafava or, at least, sitting out the race? Once Scozzafava dropped out, could they have persuaded her to either back Hoffman or stay neutral, rather than endorse Owens? Were the party's turnout and absentee ballot operations up to snuff? And lastly, should the NRCC have dropped more money into the contest?

Tuesday's loss marked the fifth time in the last two election cycles that Republicans have lost a special election in what both sides considered to be a competitive seat -- two in New York this year, and one apiece in Illinois, Louisiana and Mississippi in 2008. Sessions blamed the candidates in New York, while Cole before him blamed the candidates and/or the national climate. But in each case, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee outspent the NRCC (just as House Democrats have outraised and outspent Republicans overall in the last two cycles).

Sessions' allies point out that more than $700,000 of the roughly $900,000 the NRCC spent on the contest went into attacking Owens, not boosting Scozzafava, and the committee didn't spend any money criticizing Hoffman. But the bottom line is that the DCCC spent more than $1.1 million on the race, and that financial difference could well have been a key factor in a race decided by just 4 percent.

Going forward, Republicans hope that their positive results in Virginia and New Jersey mean more than the negative one in New York for how they will do in House races next November. The question they face, even in a political environment that might otherwise be favorable, is whether the base and the middle of the party can work together.

"This is not a simplistic problem," said Republican pollster David Winston. "You watched Democrats go through this after the 1994 election. It's the constant tension within any political party."

Simpson said he drew a similar lesson from New York: "This is a demonstration that we can't go against a Democratic opponent, even in a Republican seat, with a divided party."

http://www.ncpa.org/sub/dpd/index.php?Article_ID=18642&utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=DPD
REPUBLICAN HEALTH PLAN WOULD REDUCE PREMIUMS, CUT DEFICIT
The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) Wednesday night released its cost analysis of the Republican health care plan and found that it would reduce health care premiums and cut the deficit by $68 billion over ten years.
The Republican plan does not call for a government insurance plan but rather attempts to reform the system by creating high-risk insurance pools, allowing people to purchase health insurance policies across state lines and instituting medical malpractice reforms.

According to CBO, the GOP bill would:
• Lower costs, particularly for small businesses that have trouble finding affordable health care policies for their employees.
• Decrease rates by 7 percent to 10 percent for this group, and by 5 percent to 8 percent for the individual market, where it can also be difficult to find affordable policies.
• Have the smallest economic impact on the large group market that serves people working for large businesses that have access to the cheapest coverage; those premiums would decline by up to 3 percent.

The analysis, however, shows the Republican plan would do little to expand coverage:
• The CBO found that under the Republican plan, insurance coverage would increase by about 3 million and that the percentage of insured non-elderly adults would remain at about 83 percent after ten years.
• The House bill would increase coverage to an additional 36 million people, raising the number of insured to 96 percent.
How much will the Republican bill cost?
• The CBO put the price tag for the GOP plan at $61 billion, a fraction of the $1.05 trillion cost estimate it gave to the House bill that lawmakers are set to vote on this weekend.
• And the CBO found that the Republican provision to reform medical malpractice liability would result in $41 billion in savings and increase revenues by $13 billion by reducing the cost of private health insurance plans.

Source: Susan Ferrechio, "CBO: Republican health plan would reduce premiums, cut deficit," Washington Examiner, November 5, 2009.

For text:
http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/blogs/beltway-confidential/CBO-Prepublican-health-plan-would-reduce-premiums--69270747.html

For preliminary CBO analysis:
http://www.cbo.gov/ftpdocs/107xx/doc10705/hr3962amendmentBoehner.pdf

The analysis, however, shows the Republican plan would do little to expand coverage:
• The CBO found that under the Republican plan, insurance coverage would increase by about 3 million and that the percentage of insured non-elderly adults would remain at about 83 percent after ten years.
• The House bill would increase coverage to an additional 36 million people, raising the number of insured to 96 percent.

It's not about "forcing" anybody; it's about keeping the people of our country healthy. How about all those people without health insurance who end up in emergency rooms that we all end up paying for?

It has been widely speculated that President Bush and the GOP fell into widespread disfavor and lost majority control of Congress when they abandoned basic conservative principles.

It is a given that most American liberals didn't like President Bush to begin with and didn't vote for Republicans for Congress either. Therefore, it can be concluded that the GOP lost power when it violated those issues most important to their base generally imbedded in an ideology known as modern Conservatism.

As a replacement for the "Bush aftermath" thread which is drawing to a close, perhaps this thread could be a place where we could discuss where conservatives got it right, where we went wrong, what we need to do to regain the confidence of the Conservative base, and other GOP/Conservative issues.