FederalRepublic.net

In today’s liberal press, it is sometimes a struggle to find an encouraging story from the frontlines of Iraq or Afghanistan. Often, every news story about the region includes either articles about roadside bombings and coalition deaths or how the Bush Administration has failed to win the peace on the ground. However proud the liberal press or the Democratic Party is about telling bad news, good news does not go unnoticed. Stars and Stripes has a great article about a recent success in Iraq:

IBRAHIM AL MARKHUR, Iraq — One misplaced cell phone and one savvy interpreter equaled one dead insurgent, several pieces of intelligence and a whole lot of captured weapons.

On a routine patrol, U.S. troops with 1st Battalion, 68th Armor came upon a house in the midst of dense greenery and at the end of a dusty country road.

Staff Sgt. Matthew Nicodemus, 33, said he immediately noticed that no Iraqi men were around.

Suddenly, a cell phone inside the home rang, said Nicodemus, of Altoona, Pa.

“The interpreter went in and answered the phone, and on the other end of the phone the person said, in Arabic, ‘Hey, coalition forces are here, go ahead and run away,’ and he specifically said, ‘Go and run into the palm groves all around here,’ ” Nicodemus said.

The troops then fanned out into the palm groves and found several weapons including several rocket-propelled grenades and hand grenades, two AK-47s and a new sniper’s rifle, Nicodemus said.

They also found a hand-written map of a U.S. military base, diagrams on how to build rockets and a CD-ROM with several thousand files written in Arabic, said Sgt. 1st Class Michael Greer, 35, of San Luis Obispo, Calif.

If that weren’t enough, the insurgent kept calling the interpreter back to ask what the Americans were doing.

The interpreter kept the act going.

“He’s basically acting like, you know, he’s watching us … making sure everything is fine,” Nicodemus said.

The U.S. troops knew the insurgents were coming back and decided to lie in wait for them.

Many troops said they were psyched by the prospect of killing the person on the other end of the phone.

“I love this [expletive],” said Sgt. Nicholas Hake-Jordan, 23, of Springfield, Ore.

The troops didn’t have to wait long.

Shortly after U.S. troops set up, the insurgents called the interpreter and said they would be by in about 10 minutes to attack the Americans, said Staff Sgt. Art Hoffman, 30.

When seven insurgents got to the house, they ran into a wall of U.S. fire, said Hoffman, of Baltimore.

“The first guy that came in the door just dropped like a rock. The other two guys behind him got hit pretty hard, too. The rest grabbed their wounded and just ran back off,” said Hoffman.

One insurgent was confirmed killed in the fighting and the other two were in bad shape, he said.

Link

Craig Shirley has written a piece for the Washington Post explaining many of the issues affecting today’s Republican Party:

The immigration reform debate has highlighted a long-standing fissure in the GOP between the elitist Rockefeller business wing and the party’s conservative populist base. Whether the two groups can continue to coexist and preserve the Republican majority is increasingly doubtful as conservatives begin to consider — and in some cases cheer — the possibility that the GOP may lose control of Congress this fall.

The two camps are deeply divided. The business elites are interested in a large supply of cheap labor and support unfettered immigration and open borders. The populist base supports legal immigration but is concerned about lawlessness on our border, national sovereignty and the real security threat posed by porous borders.
 
There is nothing new about this division. It is a 40-year-old fight that has its roots in the cultural, economic, regional and ideological differences between the two camps. Still, most conservatives felt that after the victory of Ronald Reagan and the Republican Revolution of 1994 their point was made and the country-clubbers would know their place. They were wrong. The Rockefeller wing is now attempting to reassert its control over the party and is openly hostile toward the Reagan populists who created the Republican majority in the first place.

Major Republicans have taken to attacking others within their own party as unsophisticated nativists. In a recent Wall Street Journal column, former Republican National Committee chairman Ed Gillespie warned populists to cease and desist from promoting “border enforcement first” legislation. “Anti-immigration rhetoric is a political siren song, and Republicans must resist its lure,” he said. And in a recent editorial, the Weekly Standard’s Bill Kristol attacked populist Republicans for not recognizing the danger of “turning the GOP into an anti-immigration, Know-Nothing party.”

Conservatives see this kind of rhetoric as inflammatory, anti-intellectual and offensive. Far from being driven by xenophobia and intolerance, conservative populists are motivated by a profound respect for the rule of law and by a patriotic regard for America’s sovereignty and national security. Upholding the rule of law and protecting our country’s borders is important to conservative populists and to most Americans.

Link

There is nothing wrong with having divisions within the Republican Party, or any political party for that matter. However, there must be consistency with top issues, like tax cuts, immigration policy, matters of limited government, and national security. While the Republican Party has a basic party platform outlining important issues such as these, moderate and liberal Republicans seem to have given up their conservative principles in favor of more government, higher taxes, and increased regulation.

The Republican Party must return to its conservative values and base if it is to truly remain a force in Washington politics. Obstructionism from liberal Republicans and Democrats continue to deadlock much needed legislation like immigration reform and the next fiscal budget, while officials play politics with everything from the War on Terror to Social Security reform.

The Congress must remember to be wise with taxpayers’ money. It is essential the Congress return to fiscal conservativism and find common ground in regards to our nation’s security and real priorities.

By Jonathan Weisman

Members of Congress will return to Washington next week to face deep challenges including a budget morass in the House and an immigration quagmire in the Senate, while new polls indicate that voters increasingly view the legislative branch as dysfunctional.

How well Republican leaders navigate their way through the legislative mess could greatly influence the outcome of the midterm elections in November, suggests a poll released yesterday by the nonpartisan Pew Research Center for the People and the Press.

“The American public is angry with Congress, and this is bad news for the Republican Party,” the authors of the poll concluded.

-Snip-

The House left town on April 7, having failed to pass a budget blueprint for the coming fiscal year. Republican moderates said the House budget plan would spend too little, especially on health, education and workforce programs. House conservatives said the plan spent too much, and members of the Appropriations Committee objected to new budget rules that they said would tie their hands and diminish their authority.

The Senate headed for its spring break under circumstances that were no less acrimonious. Republicans charged Democrats with obstructionism on a major immigration bill, and conservatives accused Republican leaders of capitulation on the immigration issue.

Link

It would be for the benefit of the United States for Congress to take care of the people’s business as soon as politicans come back from a long Easter recess. Leaving important legislation like immigration policy and the next federal budget left undone only hinder the people’s business and allows the body politic to be filled with anger.

Congress, and Republicans in general, have not upheld their duty to the Constitution in a responsible manner. Those in Congress must understand it is their duty to not let politics get in the way of sound reforms and fiscal responsibility this country sincerely needs.

Republicans must come to grips with the reality of their actions - by failing to cut spending and earmarks, Republicans only deepen any potential economic crisis in the United States. While many politicians want to “bring home the pork” so to speak, they must understand they’ve been elected to represent their state in matters which are of national importance, and not just important to the state they respresent. Republicans must steer Congress in a new direction - a direction of fiscal conservativism, limited goverment, low taxes, and less regulation.

Conservativethink.com is carrying an article presenting what the Koran actually says about the treatment of enemies and jihad. Religion of peace indeed…

“O Prophet! Make war against the unbelievers [all non-Muslims] and the hypocrites and be merciless against them. Their home is hell, an evil refuge indeed.” (Koran, 9:73)

“When you meet the unbelievers in jihad [holy war], chop off their heads. And when you have brought them low, bind your prisoners rigorously. Then set them free or take ransom from them until the war is ended.” (Koran, 47:4)

“The punishment of those who wage war against Allah and his messenger and strive after corruption in the land will be to be killed or crucified, or have their hands and feet and genitals cut off, or to be expelled out of the land. Such will be their humiliation in the world, and in the next world they will face an awful horror.” (Koran, 5:33-34)

“When we decide to destroy a population, we send a definite order to them who have the good things in life and yet sin. So that Allah’s word is proven true against them, then we destroy them utterly.” (Koran, 17:16-17)

“In order that Allah may separate the pure from the impure, put all the impure ones [all non-Muslims] one on top of another in a heap and cast them into hell. They will have been the ones to have lost.” (Koran, 8:37)

“How many were the populations we utterly destroyed because of their sins, setting up in their place other peoples.” (Koran, 21:11)

Charles Krauthammer has written a great piece for Townhall.com considering the issues and advantages of building a wall to secure our borders from illegal crossings and to protect United States sovereignty:

WASHINGTON — Every sensible immigration policy has two objectives: (1) to regain control of our borders so that it is we who decide who enters, and (2) to find a way to normalize and legalize the situation of the 11 million illegals among us.

Start with the second. No one of good will wants to see these 11 million suffer. But the obvious problem is that legalization creates an enormous incentive for new illegals to come.

We say, of course, that this will be the very last, very final, never-again, we’re-not-kidding-this-time amnesty. The problem is that we say exactly the same thing with every new reform. And everyone knows it’s phony.

-Snip-

My proposition is the following: a vast number of Americans who oppose legalization and fear new waves of immigration would change their minds if we could radically reduce new — i.e., future — illegal immigration.

Forget employer sanctions. Build a barrier. It is simply ridiculous to say it cannot be done. If one fence won’t do it, then build a second 100 yards behind it. And then build a road for patrols in between. Put cameras. Put sensors. Put out lots of patrols.

Can’t be done? Israel’s border fence has been extraordinarily successful in keeping out potential infiltrators who are far more determined than mere immigrants. Nor have very many North Koreans crossed into South Korea in the last 50 years.

Of course it will be ugly. So are the concrete barriers to keep truck bombs from driving into the White House. But sometimes necessity trumps aesthetics. And don’t tell me that this is our Berlin Wall. When you build a wall to keep people in, that’s a prison. When you build a wall to keep people out, that’s an expression of sovereignty. The fence around your house is a perfectly legitimate expression of your desire to control who comes into your house to eat, sleep and use the facilities. It imprisons no one.

Of course, no barrier will be foolproof. But it doesn’t have to be. It simply has to reduce the river of illegals to a manageable trickle. Once we can do that, everything becomes possible — most especially, humanizing the situation of our 11 million existing illegals.

By Liz Sidoti

Ask Democratic leaders to identify their party’s election-year message and you get everything but consensus. Ahead in polls, Democrats are divided over whether they already have - or even need - a national theme that tells voters exactly where the party stands.

“One message? Hmmm. I don’t know. Let me think about it,” Alvaro Cifuentes said after a long pause. Several minutes later, the head of the Democratic National Committee’s Hispanic Caucus said: “You can’t try to simplify your politics with a slogan. You can’t.”

In more than a dozen interviews, Democrats who gathered here for the DNC’s spring meeting rattled off lists of what they believe to be their party’s message in 2006. Each had a different take.

Some said their party stands for affordable health care, lobbying reform, lower federal deficits. Others mentioned human rights, the well-being of families and the search for new energy sources. Still others cited education money, Medicare that works, a reliable Social Security program and world peace.

Lots of issues. No single message.

“It’s not that we don’t stand for anything, it’s that sometimes we stand for everything,” said Barry Rubin, executive director of the Nebraska Democratic Party.

Link

As we’ve seen time and time again, the real plan of the Democratic Party is to attempt to seize power by using the power of obstruction to derail any constructive legislation proposed by President Bush or other Republican Party members. Clearly, the reason the Democratic Party has no single message is that every message its given thus far is a form of obstructionism or an action of denouncing President Bush.

Even if the Democratic Party put together a single message in order to win votes, the body politic just wouldn’t buy it. As conservatives have observed, every year Democratic Party members have moved to the center-right of the political mainstream in an attempt to win votes. They’ve also become offended when they’ve been called “liberal.” However, the truth is, the Democratic Party message of greater government involvement in life and higher taxes just doesn’t sell to the American people. If the Democratic Party wants to gain power in Congress or the White House ever again, it must reform itself to genuinely care about traditional American values, low taxes, and limited government.

In another show of blatant hypocracy from the Democratic Party, minority leader Harry Reid denounced the Bush Adminstration for depending on the cooperation of other countries in order to quell the current Iran nuclear crisis:

RENO, Nev. - The Bush administration is relying too heavily on other countries in the international effort to stop Iran from developing nuclear weapons, according to Sen. Harry Reid.

Reid, D-Nev., said the administration should be taking the lead, but instead is relying on Germany, France and Great Britain to convince Iran to end its uranium enrichment program.

“It is hard to comprehend,” Reid said Tuesday in Reno. “We should be involved at trying to arrive at a diplomatic solution. … Not just these three countries.”

Reid said the Middle East is a “powder keg” because of U.S. failures in Iraq, the rise of fundamentalism and the recent election of Hamas in Palestine.

“Our not being involved diplomatically in trying to solve the situation in Iran shows the Bush failure in foreign policy there and elsewhere.”

Link

All during the 2004 election cycle, the Democratic Party denounced the Bush Administration for “going it alone” in Iraq, while the reality was that the “coalition of the willing” included more than 30 countries. Now Harry Reid has flip-flopped and blamed President Bush for building a major international consensus against Iran’s nuclear development. The question is “What does the Democratic Party really want?” Does the party really want to help America and do the people’s business or does it want to gain power by obstructing every major action the Bush Administration takes to protect this country? Here we see Harry Reid does not want to contribute to anything constructive in the Iranian dialogue, but would rather play politics with this country’s security priorities.

By Arthur Rotstein

TUCSON, Ariz. - If the government doesn’t build security fencing along the Mexico border, Minuteman border watch leader Chris Simcox says he and his supporters will.

Simcox, whose civilian watch group opposes illegal immigration, said Wednesday he was sending an ultimatum to     President Bush to deploy military reserves to the Arizona border by May 25 or his supporters will break ground for their own building project.

“We’re going to show the federal government how easy it is to build these security fences, how inexpensively they can be built when built by private people and free enterprise,” Simcox said.

Congress has been debating immigration reform for several months. One bill, approved by the U.S. House in December, calls for nearly 700 miles of fencing along the U.S.-Mexico border. The fence proposal has angered Mexicans, with President     Vicente Fox calling it “shameful.”

Link

As said on this website before, it is essential for the security of the United States that a physical barrier be put into place to crack down on illegal crossings of immigrants from Mexico. As this article has implied, the United States Congress has been dragging its feet on the issue of physical security to keep illegal immigrants from crossing our borders. The defense of this nation must be our government’s first priority. That priority includes the protection of our country by guarding our borders.

John Stossel, writing for RealClearPolitics has written a great article about all the hidden taxes local, state, and federal government have put upon us. One wonders whether Samual Adams and the patriots who threw British tea overboard in the “Boston Tea Party” would approve:

You probably don’t know how much you pay, because the government is sneaky about how it taxes you. Paying withholding taxes each pay period dulls the pain of the income tax — it’s money you earned, but it’s never in your hands — and a hundred other taxes are hidden. For my TV special “John Stossel Goes to Washington,” we followed St. Louis construction worker Bill Thurston and totaled the little-known taxes he paid daily. It started with the tax on the electricity that powered the alarm clock that woke him. Bill paid two taxes on his toothpaste. He paid a tax on water to get it into his home, and a sewer fee so it would go out. Daring to drive to work cost him more: He paid personal property tax on his truck; he had to pay sales tax when he bought it. And when he bought the gas, there was a county gas tax, a state gas tax and a federal gas tax.

At work, Bill gets stuck with local income tax, state income tax, federal income tax, Social Security tax and Medicare tax. Bill’s boss needs two employees just to calculate how much to withhold from paychecks, and while their salaries don’t go to the government (except for local income tax, state income tax, and so on), that’s money Bill’s employer can’t spend on developing his business or giving Bill a raise.

Because Bill’s wife works, the Thurstons pay a marriage tax of $1,000 a year. Then there’s the grocery tax, property tax, utility tax, FCC tax and a county tax on the cable TV, and a whole bunch of different taxes on the phone. And if after paying all these taxes Bill and his wife want to relax with beer or cigarettes, there are sin taxes on those.

Why should government cost us more than shelter? Political scientist James L. Payne examined the record of 14 congressional appropriations hearings and found that of 1,060 witnesses who testified, only seven spoke against spending money, while more than a thousand testified that the spending — whatever it was — was necessary. Even a politician who believes in limited government has a tough time resisting a constant onslaught of “needy” people saying, “This program is crucial!”

“In this world nothing is certain but death and taxes.” - Benjamin Franklin, 1789

Jay Tea at WizBang! Blog has written a very interesting opinion article describing the changing social atmosphere in the United States. After nearly forty years of Democratic Party control in Congress and the liberal agenda rapidly destroying our justice system, patriotism, and families, I think this article plainly expresses what many Americans are thinking - we’ve had enough!

We hold these rights not to be self-evident

With the rioting, threats, and petulant demands by many of the world’s Muslims over cartoons being revisited by South Park this last two weeks, I was put in mind of something I’ve been thinking about for some time. The United States Constitution spells out a set of rights for all people within the United States, and adds that these are not the only ones. (See the Bill Of Rights). Over the years, they have been expanded both explicitly and implicitly, but there are a whole set of so-called “rights” that have been gaining more and more prominence — and they need to be addressed.

1) The right not to be offended.

“Offense” has no absolute meaning. What someone might find offensive, another might find amusing, thought-provoking, or even laudable. The government has absolutely no business deciding what is so offensive to certain people that it will protect them with the full force of law from having their proprieties assailed.

2) The right to a job.

Nobody has a right to get any job, or any specific job. That is strictly a matter between the potential employer and applicant. There are discrimination laws that need to be enforced, but no employer should be forced to hire and keep a worker.

3) The right to come to the United States in a time, place, and manner of your own choosing.

The United States has quite possibly the laxest laws regarding immigration in the world. Whether seeking to visit, work, live, or even obtain citizenship, we are the most welcoming nation on earth. But we do have set rules and policies, and it is our right to demand they be followed — regardless of whether it might make a head of lettuce cost another dime or so, or whether high-school kids will rediscover the joys of earning extra cash mowing lawns.

4) The right to get money from the United States government.

For years and years, it has been the stated policy that no money or assistance would be given to terrorist organizations. Hamas has been pretty high on that list for some time. We stated long before the recent Palestinian elections that our policy would not change, that there would be no exception granted, should Hamas succeed in their attempt to subsume the Palestinian Authority. Now we’re hearing all kinds of whines because we are actually doing that.

5) The right to free health care.

This one especially frosts me. There is no such thing as “free health care.” As the old saying goes, if you think health care is expensive now, wait until it’s free. What these folks are demanding is that someone else pay for their health care. Perhaps they think the doctors should work for free. Perhaps they want the government to pay for it, which means that everyone else pays for it. Or maybe the insurance companies should simply “eat” the costs, right up until they are sued by their stockholders or go out of business entirely. I definitely think that there needs to be a revamping of the financial side of health care, but to “fix” it by putting the government in charge of it is insane.

I’m a bit of a libertarian, and one of the tenets of that philosophy is that if you want to find the most inefficient, most cumbersome, most inept way to achieve a goal, put the government in charge of it. There are certain areas where the government is the only body that can do certain things — national defense is one, along with maintaining the road systems and carrying out our relations with other nations — but by and large, it’s simply the laziest approach to a problem.

And never forget: “the government big enough to give you everything you want is big enough to take away everything you have.”