In writing, especially in the era of the new media, you’re only as good as your last publication… in our case, that was a couple of weeks ago. Dee, my fearless editor, and I both have full time careers. Dee in particular has an awful lot on her plate… I honestly don’t understand how she does it all.

We’ve experienced a sort of enforced hiatus due to a long overdue hiatal hernia reduction that I should have taken care of years ago. The operation, as such, went extremely well, except that I contracted pneumonia as a result of the anesthesia… so I spent a couple of extra days at the VA hospital up at Palo Alto. Great hospital, superb care… but undoubtedly the worst place there is to get any rest. So, I’ve spent the last few days luxuriating in rest and unbroken sleep.

Nothing bores me worse than other people’s health issues, and rightly so… it has no place here. But I felt that we owed an explanation to our regular readers. My stay at the hospital did give me a chance to watch the Republican National Convention in detail… much more so than I ever could have, otherwise.

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First let me say thank-you, thank-you to conservatives everywhere who spoke up and started a national firestorm over this issue.  If you're like me, you know just how important it is to the future of the conservative movement.

With the Rules meeting itself, the first problem was attendance.  Many, many of our supporters simply didn't make it there do to buses that were up to an hour late to pick them up, (Morton Blackwell of Virginia had this problem).  Many of them who didn'tmake it would have been additional signatures to our petition.  But they started the meeting anyway, introducing a motion to ratify the final report of last Friday with the exception of the rule 16 compromise language taking out candidate veto power over delegates.  This final motion passed.

As the meeting was going on, we were circulating our minority report petition.  At one point, the male delegate from Massachusetts snatched it out of the hands ot the lady from North Dakota, refusing to give it back after repeated demands, resulting in a shoving match when the delegate from Colorado came to her defense.

After the final vote was over, according to party rules, we had one hour to file our minority reports, and, according to Rules, they have to be filed with either the committee chair, secretary, or convention secretary.  Of course, after the meeting, they were no where to be found.

We continued to pick up signatures after the meeting, getting up to 24 our our Rule 12 minority report...but 4 shy of what would have been needed.   read more »

Fellow conservatives,

I'm writing this to you from the Hyatt Regency in Tampa just a few hours after finishing up the meeting of the RNC Convention Rules Committee, of which I am a member...and have been two other times in the past...as a delegate from South Carolina.  I have been involved in the party for over 25 years, a five time delegate and a former member of the RNC.  (Find me on Twitter @DrewMcKissick).

I am writing in hope that you will help spread the word to conservative activists about something terrible that is happening.  Today, the committee voted - after several contentous votes - to change our party rules to allow future presidential candidates to essentiall pick who they want as delegates...rather than how most states do, which is simply allowing everyone to run, and if they win, they win.  The new rules would let a campaign strike anyone they don't like.

I, along with 28 other members have started a Minority Report petition to the full convention to try and make sure that this change is NOT adopted into the final changes the full convention approves on Tuesday.  But we need your help to spread the word.  28 members are required to issue a minority report for the convention to even consider...and you can be sure others are working to peel some of them off by Monday...so we need to add more by Monday.

Let me stop here and say that this is NOT...REPEAT NOT a move by a bunch of disgruntled Ron Paul supporters.  This is a group of long-time conservative activists, even "party r  read more »

A candidate who promises to preserve, protect, and defend Medicare, save it from going bankrupt, implement his plan for only those under 55, and let you keep your benefits exactly as they are now if you don’t like his changes: this is the candidate Democrats are portraying as a faceless monster diabolically wheeling Grandma off a cliff.

We’ve reached the apotheosis of the Democratic Party’s political strategy: take the Republican who’s most likely to do it the favor of justifying, rescuing, and strengthening its bloated, big-government welfare programs, and then smear him as their callous, murderous destroyer.

Ten days after Mitt Romney’s Vice-Presidential nomination announcement, liberals are still spreading the meme that Paul Ryan was a suicidal choice, because he dared come up with a serious Medicare reform proposal—gradually turn the program into a voucher-supported private system—and include it in two House-passed federal budgets.  The left waited about five minutes after the VP pick, then cried, “See—Romney didn’t get a Ryan bounce.  He screwed up!”

Wait till Americans hear Paul Ryan debate Joe Biden and field questions from a smarmy, economically illiterate press.  Then they won’t be crowing that Romney committed political hari-kari.

Back in 2010, the left claimed that Tea Party candidates would hurt the GOP in the midterm elections, because Americans wouldn’t tolerate their extremist, far-right views.  Then Republicans won a historic landslide, picking up 63 seat  read more »

Paul Ryan scares the living daylights out of the DeMarxists. With good reason. He was the perfect choice for Mitt Romney, whom many conservatives considered to be too vanilla, too privileged, too rich and out of touch with ‘the common man’. More importantly, he was viewed as another inside-the-beltway Republican selection.

Conservatives, deeply mistrustful of what we have come to recognize as the Republicrat establishment who brought us magnificent beltway failures such as Bob Dole and my favorite, John ‘You can’t do it my friend’ McCain, were understandably leery of what they saw as another insider pick. Many still are.

Conservative patriots saw Romney as soft on illegal immigration and, worse, pro government-run healthcare vis à vis his Massachusetts health care plan. Coming at a time when the country had been virtually taken over by a Marxist cabal bent on turning this country into a third-world swamp, to forever bind its citizens to the slavish penury of communism. He was seen as too compromised and too weak to take on the DeMarxists.  read more »

The Marketplace Fairness Act, legislation introduced by Rep. Steve Womack (R-AK), would allow states to collect sales taxes from purchases made on the Internet. 

Supporters of this bill believe that is unfair that a small bookstore on Main Street has to collect sales taxes while a multi-billion dollar bookstore like Amazon does not. 

The end result of the disparity is that the government is encouraging shoppers to do their purchases online -- creating an incentive to not support local neighborhood stores. 

Some conservatives oppose the legislation, most notably the Heritage Foundation and Sen. Jim DeMint. (R-SC).  DeMint, a Tea Party champion, argues that the legislation constitutes "taxation without representation," allowing states to apply their tax codes to non-residents with mere economic presence in the state.  read more »

An astute political observer by the name of Machiavelli once said that “Anyone wishing to see what is to be must consider what has been”.  Given that recent polls have shown the race for President to be essentially tied, a look at the “tale of the tape” from a current and historical perspective is in order.

The Economy:

No president since World War II has won re-election with an unemployment rate above 7.2%.  The current rate is 8.3%, and has been above 8% for forty-two straight months.  The economy is growing at an annual rate of just 1.5%, and the only president in recent years to run for re-election with a worse growth rate was Jimmy Carter.

The Consumer Confidence level is currently about 60%, which is historically (and electorally) awful, since it was 65% when Carter got clobbered by Reagan in 1980.

According to the Rasmussen Poll, a majority of Americans (54%) think that the economy and their own finances (52%) are getting worse.  Only 40% believe that things will be any better five years from now, and that number is down to 35% among business owners who recently found out that Obama thinks that they didn’t build their own businesses.

The last two times that the economy dominated the election like it does today was in 1992 and 1980, which weren’t good years for incumbents.

Job Approval:  read more »

So, an illegal alien comes into your home and assaults and robs you.  Worse, they rape and murder your family.  Good thing is they get caught and go to jail, right?  Even better, they get deported back to their original county.  Not so fast.

Some countries won’t take back their citizens after they’ve commited crimes.  The criminals get released back to the streets in our cities and town only to commit more crimes.  Fox News reports:

Long after they were ordered out of the country, thousands of criminal aliens from places like China, Cuba, Vietnam and Pakistan remain free in the United States to commit new crimes because their home countries refuse to take them back.  

For years, this unique problem percolated under the political radar. But recent crimes by immigrant felons have lawmakers scrambling to punish nations that refuse to repatriate their own citizens. The Obama administration and many Democrats in Congress, however, are blocking punitive legislation, preferring to let the State Department handle the issue diplomatically.

Here are some examples of what I’m talking about here.  Via FoxNews.com  read more »

Democrats are hiding their terror at Paul Ryan’s selection as Mitt Romney’s running mate by claiming he was a terrible pick, his ideas horrify people, and now Romney will never be able to run from voters’ fears about his callous persona.

Lost in Democrats’ self-deluding hosannas is the possibility that Romney chose Ryan because he agrees with him and that Ryan will help the ticket.

In “5 Things Mitt Doesn’t Want You to Know About Paul Ryan,” ABC News announced that Ryan’s “budget plans include big cuts” that will enable the Obama campaign to continue its “Romneyhood narrative.”

Outside the Norfolk, Virginia rally where Romney announced his pick, Andrea Mitchell cried that Ryan is “not a pick for suburban moms, not a pick for women.”

Candy Crowley declared the Ryan pick “some sort of ticket death wish.”

Walter Shapiro warned that Ryan’s budgets put Social Security and Medicare “in the cross-hairs.”  read more »

Already I’ve seen social media comments from constitutional conservatives complaining about Romney’s selection of Paul Ryan. It’s a given, no viable candidate can ever meet their standards. I could have predicted it, it would not have mattered who was selected, the VP pick would have taken a vote in favor of the wrong piece of legislation or made an endorsement they didn’t like. So I would like to propose a moratorium on complaining about Romney/Ryan. No candidate who accepts our constitutional positions would be electable anyway. I wish they would be, but with the left wing control of the media, the public teacher’s union focusing more on socialist indoctrination than education and so many of the churches, who should be fighting the rot in our society, meekly going along with liberalism, it just isn’t so. We have much education to do and we need some time to do it.  read more »