This interesting poll shows the following:

Among TEA Partiers –

79% are white – and so are 75% of Americans.

16% are under 30 – and so are 17% of Americans.

15% have a post-graduate degree – and so do 16% of Americans.

The only place TEA Partiers are a bit out of kilter is among black Americans – 11% or so of Americans are black, but only about 6% of TEA Partiers…but, even then, its still hardly the lilly-white group of Obama-hating racists its made out to be.

Which, of course, anyone who attended a TEA Party could have said. These are just regular folks, fed up with the corruption and arrogance of government. Democrats will ignore or downplay this at their peril – and I do expect them to take the perilous route: too many Democrats are too deeply compromised by the current system. They are stuck – only a complete abandonment of what they are can cure – and that still means losing in November.

This isn’t going away – and it isn’t going to fade. Nor will even an improving economy halt it. People are furious – coldly furious. Determined to have done with it and start over. Now, the GOP wins and doesn’t do right, then they’ll be clobbered the next time out…this isn’t pendulum swinging. This is Revolution.

Cross Posted: Noonan for Nevada

What we’ll get if Justice Stevens retires:

Should pro-abortion Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens decide in the coming days or weeks to retire, three potential replacements have been named as the most likely candidates to replace him. Two of the potential nominees for President Barack Obama are longtime pro-abortion activists.

The most talked about potential nominees include U.S. Solicitor General Elena Kagan and federal appellate judges Diane Wood and Merrick Garland.

Those names have been in the news before and a White House official confirmed Sunday to Bloomberg News that those names are prominent on Obama’s list of replacements.

The problem for the pro-life movement is Kagan and Wood are extreme nominees and pro-life groups would likely strongly oppose their nominations.

This is part of the cost of losing, fellow conservatives. While Stevens is a mindless, pro-abortion vote on the Court and thus his replacement won’t change the dynamic, what we’re going to get is a young, vigorous anti-constitutionalist fool to replace an old one. We’ll be burdened, essentially, with Stevens for several more decades. Keep that in mind the next time the GOP nominee isn’t conservative “enough”.

Of course, there could be a cure for this when President Pal….errmmm… I mean, when the next Republican President gets elected: pack the court. Sure, I know that FDR tried it and failed, but there really is no reason for 9 Justices as opposed to, say, 11 or 13. We have to drown out these judicial activists some how – what better way than to add four judges who obey the law?

With 13 Justices (and a rational argument can be made for a larger number of appellate courts to handle our vastly increased judicial workload) the four or five liberal justices could write all the dissenting opinions they want. They could assert there is a right to private, cherry ice cream in the Constitution, for all we’ll care – the 7 justices we’ll be sure are conservative will be too busy enforcing the law for us to care.

And the real beauty of it – the rationale for 13 Justices is the fact that we really do need more appellate courts to handle the vastly increased judicial work load. And why do we have this work load? Because liberal lawyers are suing everything to smithereens. We can make judicial liberalism the author of its own destruction.

Cool, huh?

And is providing a blue print for us to do the same for America:

FPM: Gov. Chris Christie made national news when he recently unveiled a budget heavy on spending cuts – the kind of thing that politicians often promise but seldom deliver. What were some of the highlights of his proposed budget for you?

Rooney: There are plenty of reasons for taxpayers to celebrate this budget. The best part? In the interest of rescuing New Jersey from a fiscal abyss, Christie’s budgetary cuts to municipal aid are a challenging but extremely necessary step in the right direction. Right now, our 566 towns are literally addicted to annual handouts from Trenton. You can’t save money or avoid waste with such an inefficient system in place. The only workable solution is to cut out the middleman, slash state spending, and let towns keep more of their revenue. The next logical step will be corporate and property tax cuts, but Christie’s first budget is an important leap forward towards structurally reforming the way our state government operates.

Christie – no movement social conservative – is even taking on the pro-abortion movement by slashing State funding for Planned Parenthood. The man has guts, and I’m admiring him more and more, all the time.

Read the rest of it here.

Cant’ thank the President enough for this:

President Barack Obama raised $2.5 million for the Democratic National Committee Thursday night, but his trip to Boston had another, less publicized purpose — saving Deval Patrick.

Few politicians are as close to Obama as the Massachusetts Democratic governor or have deeper ties to the president and his core team of advisers.

And almost no one faces a tougher reelection battle this year than Patrick, whose disapproval ratings would be considered near-terminal if not for the three-way race that he currently finds himself in.

As a result, the White House is looking to every weapon in its arsenal to help Patrick win a second term.

Their best weapon would be Obama anywhere but Massachusetts. Didn’t these guys learn their lesson with Brown?

We Republicans really have to work out a way to convince Obama to campaign personally for each Democrat up for re-election – its like the surest means to victory, ya know?

I know, I know – the official word is that Obama is still personally popular. That’s cool – I like the guy, myself…but anyone he endorses is going to automatically obtain my vote for the other guy. Obama is wrong about everything and the more we find out about him, the less we like what he does..endorsing Democrats now is like giving us a list of people to beat.

Sometimes, you just have to wonder whether Obama is stupid, or just wants to make America weak.

President Obama said Monday that he was revamping American nuclear strategy to substantially narrow the conditions under which the United States would use nuclear weapons.

Mr. Obama’s strategy is a sharp shift from those of his predecessors and seeks to revamp the nation’s nuclear posture for a new age in which rogue states and terrorist organizations are greater threats than traditional powers like Russia and China.

It eliminates much of the ambiguity that has deliberately existed in American nuclear policy since the opening days of the cold war. For the first time, the United States is explicitly committing not to use nuclear weapons against nonnuclear states that are in compliance with the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, even if they attacked the United States with biological or chemical weapons or launched a crippling cyberattack.

This is unbelievable. Obama is saying that America will not do whatever it takes to defend itself. And we’re supposed to call this moron Commander-in-Chief. He’s practically inviting our enemies (including al Qaeda) to attack us by giving them the heads up that any attack will not be met with an proportionate response. Whatever happened to peace through strength? if our enemies don’t see us as strong that makes us more vulnerable. So, thanks Obama, you made America less safe.

Obama this afternoon.

President Bush back in 2001.

Some pitches are high and outside. Others are perfect strikes that lift a nation.

It really is as bad as the most alarmist make it out to be:

..With ferocious speed, the financial crisis, recession and efforts to combat the recession have swung the U.S. debt from worrisome to ruinous…

…Lost amid last month’s passage of the new health care law, the Congressional Budget Office issued a report showing that within this decade, President Obama’s own budget sends the U.S. government to a potential tipping point where the debt reaches 90 percent of gross domestic product.

Economists Carmen Reinhart of the University of Maryland and Kenneth Rogoff of Harvard University have recently shown that a 90 percent debt-to-GDP ratio usually touches off a crisis.

This year, the debt will reach 63 percent of GDP, a ratio that has ignited crises in smaller wealthy nations. Fiscal crises gripped Canada, Denmark, Sweden, Finland and Ireland when their debts were below where the United States is shortly headed…

It isn’t actually sustainable – not now, and now with Obama’s plans to wrack up another $10 trillion in debt. If we balance the budget in the next couple years, we can get out of this – if we don’t, then there is nothing to do but prepare for a very long national economic crisis. And that two year window gets smaller if the economy tanks for other causes (which I do expect – but also realize that by borrowing and printing like mad, Obama might be able to keep the ball in the air for another year or two).

The bill has come due, the party is over. Terribly sorry, liberals, but you’ll just have to squeak by with a measly $2.5 trillion or so in annual spending. I know, I know – how can we fundamentally transform America with such a pittance? But its either do it, or lose it all. Half a loaf is better than none.

Of course, no liberal will agree to this – blindness combines with arrogance and stupidity on the left.

Obamunism at work:

America’s jobs growth engine is being choked to death.

A record 25 percent increase in the taxes against US small businesses — from costs associated with new health care law, to an increased Medicare tax, increased capital gains taxes and higher state and city taxes — is repealing any ability of these entrepreneurs to add jobs to their payroll.

And the numbers for New York’s small- to medium-sized business are just as harrowing.

By one estimate, the effective tax rate on the 26 million small businesses across the country — which in the past have accounted for more than half of the job growth in the US — has jumped to 50 percent from 40 percent, sucking valuable cash from the businesses.

And here’s the really bad news: the Bush tax cuts expire on December 31st and so there will be an even larger burden on small businesses in 2011 (that is taxes on “the rich” in liberal-speak…of course, “the rich” are never people like George Soros…but they are owners of small and mid-sized businesses). One friend of mine pretty wise in these things figures that part of the reason we’re seeing a bit of economic growth in 2010 is because businesses are front-loading as much business activity as they can in to 2010 in order to avoid paying higher taxes on it in 2011…but the down side there is that 2011 activity will then be much, much less.

We’re in a really bad way and unless President Obama swiftly changes course – by, say, renewing the Bush tax cuts – then we’re going to have a very rough ride.

More evidence of that booming economy:

U.S. crude futures hit an 18-month high on Monday, climbing toward $86 per barrel…U.S. crude has risen almost 2 percent in the first five days of the quarter, versus a rise of 5.5 percent through the whole of the first three months of the year.

Unsurprisingly, as that article is from Reuters, this is actually reported as good news – its because the economy is so strong that oil prices are this high. Bunch of pinheads not seeming to realize that oil at $86 a barrel a huge tax on everything and thus will reduce overall economic activity. Who is going to want to take a long car trip this summer if gasoline is more than $4 a gallon? No matter – the happy talk must continue!

Then there’s this:

The U.S. office vacancy rate in the first quarter reached its highest level in 16 years…

…The U.S. office vacancy rate rose to 17.2 percent, a level unseen since 1994, as the market lost about 11.6 million net square feet of occupied space during the first quarter, according to the report released on Monday. The U.S. vacancy rate inched up 0.2 percentage points from a quarter earlier and was 2 percent higher than a year ago.

Once again, that is Reuters and thus the overall story is pitched as positive – the occupancy rate is not dropping as fast as before! Woohoo! Never occurs to them that we might be reaching the irreducible minimum – in other words, there is in a nation of 300 million a certain amount of work which has to be done, and thus there is a minimum of office space which will be occupied.

Ah, well – it doesn’t really matter. The course is set – for better or worse, Obama has implemented his policies and there is no indicator of a change coming. What will happen, will happen.

Just get ready for a rough ride.

As it looks like Obama will at least take a stab at immigration reform in 2010, we Conservatives should get our policy and rhetoric ducks in a row – Warner Todd Huston over at Nevada News and Views offers some ideas:

…to be seen as the anti-Hispanic party will destroy the GOPs electoral future … Americans of Hispanic origin are a wildly growing part of the electorate. If we are seen as their enemy we are doomed to minority status. We need a logical and legitimate way to win them over.

To my personal experience, I have seen many sons and daughters of immigrants — both legal and illegal — and these kids don’t want to be Mexicans, or Guatemalans, or what have you. They might not mind visiting the country of their parent’s birth but they generally would rather stay here and they think of themselves as natural born Americans.

But I will have to agree with Nadler that if these young people grow up thinking that the GOP is filled with people that hate them, then these new voters will reflexively vote Democrat in huge numbers. Folks like Nadler are right that we could be committing electoral suicide if we allow this perception to grow.

Huston goes on to list pretty much what I feel is the best form of immigration policy for conservatives: increased border security coupled with a rational and merciful policy towards those already in country. In contrast to this, Obama and his Democrats will try to put out some eyewash on border security and shove as many current illegals on to the voter rolls as swiftly as possible. For Democrats, it is only about votes and power – but couched in a “we care” rhetoric coupled with kickbacks to hispanic “leaders” who will toe the Democrat line, this could work.

We need to counter it – and demanding deportation of 12 million people won’t do it, fellow conservatives. No matter how correct it is in matter of law, the fact remains that we – as a people – essentially invited these illegals to come here. You can shout till you’re blue in the face that you’ve been calling for deportation and border security for 20 years and it won’t matter in the least. In a democratically governed republic, you’re responsible for what government does even when you vigorously opposed it. The fact is that they are here, now, and we called them in over the past 25 years.

An additional thing to keep in mind here is that the Democrats are desperate to tag us as racists in 2010 and beyond. Their most recent efforts have fallen completely flat – the first time the race card has been played and failed. Lets not hand them a new deck of race cards by being out there in the streets like a bunch of nativist yahoos, ok?

Hispanic immigrants are little Republicans in larval form – they are Catholic. They are socially conservative. They are hard working and tend to want to start a business and get ahead (yes, I know that some of them come here and immediately drop on to the welfare rolls – those can be dealt with, but the broad mass are typified by those guys I see standing out in front of Star Nursery day in and day out, willing to do any work – no matter how hard – just to make a few bucks).

As they are poor they also would like some help – especially in health care, education and housing. That is what Democrats are counting on – getting them on the liberal welfare plantation and then keeping them there. We need to appeal to the Catholic, socially conservative, hard working elements – but this means we can’t ignore the welfare aspects.

If we make it clear that we are going to welcome those who have been here for a substantial time who have stayed out of trouble while also securing the border as a means of protecting innocent people who are victimized by the criminal element (the border is a little shop of horrors on that level), then we can make a credible case for hispanic support for the GOP. This is not to say that we’ll immediately roll up majorities – but we can pull in 35-40% on a regular basis and build on that as hispanic immigrants become more integrated in to American society. Go about it any other way, and we’ll just have yet another constituency giving 90% of their votes to Democrats – and when hispanics eventually make up 25 of the electorate, that will be devastating to us.

We do this right, and we win a generation of power for ourselves while securing for America another version of, say, the Italian or Polish immigrants of the past. We do this wrong, and we wreck ourselves and our country.