Red State

Are they asking us to vote? Yes, actually, they are. And the following got my "Die" vote in spades.

Just so you're clear, Jesus mocking the Bible is "funny", whereas voting on a matter of law is tantamount to enslavement.

You know, first it was "The More You Know". Then "This is your brain on drugs". Then "George Bush hates black people," "Yes We Can," and "Don't Vote" ... when are television and Hollywood going to stop cramming their religion down our throats? Aren't they, like, against proselytizing?

When Hollywood and their Democrat underlings see your religion they say keep it in your pants. And that's about the only thing they want out of the public square.

I agree, Saxby.

Fresh off his double-digits runoff win, Republican Sen. Saxby Chambliss says his party must return to its conservative roots.

But what is troubling is this:

he said he expects his campaign will be a model for Republicans looking to regroup in the 2010 election cycle.

Now, if you mean being forced to put your team in the corner and let the professional, conservative adults in the room take over, rescue you, and win, then absolutely! If you mean, blow a lead, burn through a wad of cash, run a cluster *$#! of a campaign, get into a runoff, and scramble around like mad forcing others into difficult positions they should not have had to be in, then no.

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Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-TX), a member of the Republican Study Committee, has had enough of Congressional bailouts.

Right now there is $350 billion left of he $700 billion Congressional bailout funds. He has an alternative to more bailouts: a two month tax holiday.

Gohmert’s tax holiday plan is elegant in its simplicity: every American taxpayer would pay no federal income or FICA taxes for the first two months of 2009. For the typical American family -- earning about $50,000 a year -- that would mean they would keep about $2000 that would otherwise be paid to the government.

Gohmert’s plan doesn’t pay for Wall Street bonuses or let banks use bailout money to buy other banks or pay dividends. It doesn’t rely on bureaucrats to pay money out to the right people at the right time or try to stimulate the economy with token payments to people who don’t pay taxes.

Gohmert would like to hold the holiday in January or February of next year. It would cost approximately $332 billion, still cheaper than using the rest of the bailout money for a bailout.

Freeing individuals from two months of federal taxation would be a substantial benefit to families and the economy. “Those who can’t catch up on their mortgage get one-third of their money back each month and then they’ll be able to catch up on their mortgages. They’ll be able to refinance their mortgages, they’ll be able to buy stock that they can’t currently buy,” Gohmert said.

He added, “Somebody earning $72,000 would get a couple of thousand dollars back a month if we allow them to get back both income tax and FICA.”

You can sign our petition to support Congressman Gohmert. As events unfold and the legislation is drafted, we will email petition signers with the names and phone numbers of Congressmen to call to support the Gohmert plan.

You can post this petition too by embedding this code in your site:

<script src="https://widgets.kimbia.com/widgets/form.js?channel=redstate.kimbia.com/taxholiday"> </script>

The direct link to the petition is here.

It'd be a lie. Anyway, tell the truth: you saw this...

...and then you probably thought this.

Or at least now wish that you had.

Moe Lane

PS: Oh, don't scowl, lurkers. As one of my cobloggers noted privately, at least now Martin has everything he needs to lose the Governor's race in 2010.

From a friend in Ohio:

Brett is a bad man and should be in prison. He moved with his fundraiser wife to Florida, largely to run this business and avoid a lot of the new business taxes that he authored while serving as Chief of Staff for corrupt former speaker of the Ohio House Larry Householder. (He wrote a fascinating 109 page memo- which was leaked online- on how to destroy Ken Blackwell as retribution for being the only Ohio Republican to push a ballot issue to repeal the 2003 sales tax increase.)

Brett did that exact same thing with vendors for the Ohio House Republican caucus.  He would overpay vendors, or set up new vendors himself, then he, Kyle Sisk, and Householder would receive secret "consulting fees" from the vendors. I don't think it's illegal for a campaign committee to overpay for services (ie, $100,000 for 60 copies of the same basic 4 page campaign website from a firm he made up called "Wired Voter") but he certainly helped set Ohio House Republicans on the path to the minority status they earned in November.

Blackhedd has given an excellent analysis of where the Big 3 bailout stands, and why Congressional leaders are having a hard time building support for quick action. It therefore should come as no surprise that House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer is now warning automakers that Congress will not act unless leaders reach a bipartisan agreement in the next few days:

House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) said on Tuesday that the House will not come back into session next week unless a deal is reached in the coming days to aid the sinking auto industry.

Hoyer gave a definitive response of “no” when asked if the chamber would schedule votes even if Democratic leaders are unable to reach a bipartisan agreement on a multibillion-dollar rescue package for auto manufacturers.

“If we believe that there is a possibility to pass legislation that would lead to continued viability ... then we would return,” Hoyer said.

Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) is expected to hold a press event later today to address the issue.

Across the Dome, the Senate is scheduled to come back on Monday at 3 p.m. but Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) wouldn’t say on Tuesday whether the chamber would hold votes. He deferred to the Senate Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee, which is holding hearings on the matter this week.

“We hope we can work something out with them, but it’s up to them to show that there will be accountability and viability,” Reid said. “We don’t want to throw a lifeline if the lifeline doesn’t get them to shore.”

Speaker Pelosi is expected to make the final call on whether to return for a lame duck session on Friday. Hoyer's warning might be setting the stage for Pelosi to announce that the automakers' recovery plans aren't good enough to merit tens of billions in taxpayer money, or it might be an attempt to generate more heat on Members who oppose the bailout.

But if the comments of House Democrats are open to multiple interpretations, Reid's test appears to all but rule out a bailout for Detroit. After all, if the automakers really need between $100 and $200 billion to be genuinely viable, any action that takes place next week will fall short. No one in Congress is even suggesting that much money right now; so there's no way Congress can take action in the next week 'to get them to shore.'

Of course, Reid might just be saying something stupid. It's been known to happen before.

We have a lot of readers from Georgia. I know. I track all the IP addresses. I don't know who all they are, but I know we have a lot.

And I know we have a number of regular commenters/diarists here, not just readers.

We've been saying we want to take RedState to the next level. So let's start. Let's make Georgia the pilot project. It's easy for me since I live here.

If you want to get involved as part of the RedState Army of Activists in Georgia, go here and sign up.

This week, Congress returns to the question of what to do with the domestic auto industry, Detroit’s humbled Big Three. And the options range from awful to unthinkable.

Yesterday we got a reading of auto sales in November. The story was extremely bad. Continuing the trend from October, sales were down anywhere from a third to a half, across all the manufacturers who sell in North America.

Put simply, the US consumer, whose purchases comprise over 70% of GDP, has gone on strike. In the case of the automotive sector, opinion is split over the exact reason. It could be mostly because finance for new-car purchases has become far harder to get, as the credit crisis continues in full force.

Or, much more ominously, it could be because US consumers have simply decided to step down their purchasing levels, for whatever reason. Possibilities include: uncertainty about their jobs, desire to increase personal savings, concern about their ability to afford necessities, or a lack of confidence about the economy in general.

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Sigh. I hate writing these posts. But it is necessary. Patrick Ruffini and I have both written about the need to purge the party of the "you scratch my back, I'll scratch your back" consultant regime that gets us into so many problems. Truth be told, I wrote this post on November 21, 2008, but decided the damage was already done and I'd wait until after the runoff to shed a light on it.

Let me make this short and to the point:

A group called Majority Strategies did the famous Republican mail piece to Ohio and other states that had the absentee ballot form. Remember that one? It screwed up an absentee ballot mail piece into Ohio because it didn't understand Ohio law on absentee ballots. As a result, a lot of McCain voters had their absentee ballots rejected and McCain had to file suit over the rejections.

Majority Strategies sent out the same damn mail piece, without fixing the problem other than putting Georgia graphics on it, to Georgia voters for the Senate runoff. Luckily, the campaign staff at the NRSC caught the problem after some folks in Gwinnett County, Georgia had their absentee ballot applications rejected. But the damage was already done.¹

Local election officials have said that they have never had anywhere close to this many absentee ballot applications invalidated – literally half in some of the biggest counties – and it’s because of poor, cookie cutter design that would easily have been fixed if it were done by someone who knew Georgia or by doing even basic due dilligence of checking with the Secretary of State to ensure the applications were correct and if there was anything that could cause them to be rejected.

This all begs the question: Who is Majority Strategies?

They've done mail for the GOP since 1996. The organization proudly features Brett Buerck as an employee. He was the Ohio Republican Consultant investigated in a federal money laundering investigation.

Majority Strategies' founder is Sam Van Voorhis.

Sam Van Voorhis is also doing the independent expenditures for the NRSC.

So you have the head of independent expenditures at the NRSC funneling money to his own firm (now called NextWave Communication) to send the same flawed mail piece to a different state causing the NRSC to then have to spend extra money it does not have on phone banking operations to cover their ass. Likewise, the Georgia GOP had to send out lots of email blasts to party faithful about the issue, which just caused them to spend a heck of a lot of time fielding questions about the absentee ballots as opposed to getting other people out to vote.

We need an Operation Leper for groups like this.

Good on the President-elect for this decision:

President-elect Barack Obama is not planning to implement a windfall profit tax on oil companies because prices have dropped below $80 a barrel, an aide said on Tuesday.

"President-elect Obama announced the policy during the campaign because oil prices were above $80 per barrel," an aide on Obama's transition team said. "They are currently below that now and expected to stay below that."

Oil prices have fallen from a record $147 a barrel in July to under $50 this week.

Of course, no matter what the price of oil, a windfall profits tax is a terrible idea so the President-elect should not have waited until the price of oil fell before making the decision to ditch the tax. Additionally, it would have been nice if the President-elect had taken a stance against the windfall profits tax irrespective of the price of oil during the campaign. But I suppose that was not possible; the "reality-based community" would have objected if Barack Obama was actually reality-based when it came to this issue.

Okay, so it is somewhat mean to be so snarky and yes, Democrats have far more to brag about in this election cycle than do Republicans so perhaps I jumped offsides on the snark. But it remains worth noting that with Saxby Chambliss's big win in today's Georgia Senate runoff, Obamamania has met certain limits. While there was some concern that Chambliss was not breaking 50% in the polls and thus may have been vulnerable, the incumbent won by 20 points. I'm sure that is good for a few raised heads and cocked eyebrows in Punditland, where many of the residents seemed to think that the race would be closer.

It should be noted as well that in the battle of the surrogates, John McCain and Sarah Palin overcame Bill Clinton, Al Gore and Barack Obama--all of whom campaigned for Chambliss's opponent, Jim Martin. With the win, Republicans will officially prevent Democrats from reaching 60 seats in the Senate. The only contest that remains is the one in Minnesota where Norm Coleman is doing well enough that Al Franken is trying to get the Senate to come and save him.

So tonight was a big win for Republicans. And a wake-up call to Democrats that there remain positions of electoral strength for Republicans. The party has been written off before and has come back to surprise. Maybe we are seeing the stirrings of a surprise gather even now.

I would like to reassure our Republican readers that my mentioning of Joseph Cao's alternate name in the title is in no way intended to diminish his quite impressive accomplishments in the community. You can volunteer to his campaign here, by the way - or, again, contact the LA GOP. No, I'm fully confident that any Republican reading this understands the stakes. The title is simply there to remind our Democratic readers that there will be a clear and stark moral choice going on in Saturday's election... and that anybody who doesn't do whatever they can to defeat Bill Jefferson has made the wrong moral choice.

In other words: vote for the Republican.
It's important.

Moe Lane

PS: Again: ...in his freezer.

John Fleming's website is here; contributions here, but what he probably wants right now is boots on the ground. Or you could contact the Louisiana GOP.

This is a race for an open seat, and right now the Democratic challenger's major hope is in heavy African-American turnout. Obama has not come down to stump for the candidate - he's pretty much done what he did for Martin, minus the rap stars - and this is a GOP-leaning district (R+7), so it can be won.

If we go for it. Eyes on the prize, people. Eyes on the prize.

Both Sarah Palin and Barack Obama campaigned in Georgia. Palin flew all over the state rallying Republicans. Obama flew under the radar heavily targeting black voters, demanding support for Martin, and running heavy radio advertising on urban stations.

Ladies and Gentlemen, black voters turned out for Obama, but not for Obama's candidates. Remember that for 2010.

But folks, remember this too: Sarah Palin asked Republicans to turn out and they did. Of all the Republicans who campaigned for Chambliss, she was the only one that went all over the state for him. And it paid off.

Now Saxby, pay attention: If you do not fire Charlie Harmon tomorrow and undergo a significant restructuring of your Washington office you will prove yourself a fool who has learned nothing from this. Hiring a Democrat to run your office was a bad idea. That he pushed you to engage in bipartisan compromises that did nothing but piss off your base was inexcusable. A Chief of Staff could keep you out of this crap, not get you into it. He should himself resign.

Also, memo to the Georgia Republican Party: Sue Everhart is not eligible for re-election in 2009 as Chairman of the Georgia Republican Party. The stunning lack of anything displayed by the statewide GOP apparatus disqualifies her.