by Jim Simpson

The Democrats have won what is really a tepid victory. They were forced to run conservatives and moderates in many districts in order to succeed, hardly a ringing endorsement for the liberal policies that are sure to come. Their margin of control in both houses is puny.

Just the same, this is the beginning of the end of our Constitutional Republic as we know it. My contempt for the stupidity of the American voter, and the inept fecklessness of the Republican Party which allowed this to happen, knows no bounds. It is way past time for us to recognize that we have an active, widespread, domestic conspiracy – yes conspiracy damn it – within our very own borders, whose purpose it is to destroy this country from within, as Lenin predicted.

Who on earth would deliberately vote to have their already heavy tax burden increased, especially when almost a century of experience demonstrates that government absorbs taxes like a sponge, grows endlessly when provided new resources, and produces little of value to show for it? Who on earth would deliberately hand our sworn enemies, who have stated and demonstrated repeatedly their determination to kill us all, virtually certain victory in a war they could not hope to win in the long term, if only we stayed the course? Who, please tell me, who in their right mind would do this…deliberately??

The answer is people who have been so manipulated, so misled, so intimidated, so repeatedly lied to by Leftist media, academics and politicians, that they actually think they are doing the right thing.

Democrat Nancy Pelosi’s victory speech sounded nice and conciliatory. Everywhere, Democrat politicians are reassuring us that they want to work with Republicans and make it a “bipartisan” effort.

Let me tell you what is really in store. Democrats will, as usual, talk out of both sides of their mouths. While relentlessly pushing their radical leftist agenda, they will work overtime to simultaneously present a moderate image for these next two years, in an attempt to undermine any resurgent support for Republicans in 2008. They can depend on the media to shield them in this effort, and paint any Republican resistance to their agenda as “partisan gridlock.” All the while they will be working furiously in the background to consolidate their Congressional power and prepare for the victory of Hillary Clinton in 2008. And Hillary will be the Democrats’ candidate, mark my words.

I watched an interview last night with Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid. He was smiling; modest, soft-spoken, self-effacing, even charming. Am I talking about the same man? He sounded so nice, so reassuring that the Dems wanted to “move forward in a bipartisan spirit,” even I began to let down my guard. But barely a minute into the interview, he lied. He said that even the military wanted change in Iraq, and cited as evidence the opinions of Army Times, Air Force Times, Navy Times and Marine Corps Times. But he knows that these publications are owned by the very liberal Gannet News. They are not associated with the military in any way, but are instead yet another example of the Left insinuating itself into an organization with a known reputation, in order to manipulate public opinion by presenting itself as something it isn’t. So my final thought before switching off the TV in disgust was, “It starts already.”

Democrats won this election by trumpeting Republican failures, some of which unfortunately were real. But many were mere perceptions, assiduously developed over the years by the Democrats’ silent partners in the mass media, especially as regards the Iraq war. Everything from WMD and the al Qaeda connections to behavior of our troops in the field has been shamelessly lied about, distorted and attacked to an unprecedented degree by Western media. How does the voting public, most of whom of necessity spend their waking hours earning a living, get the facts, when most of the news sources they have time to consult relentlessly serve up the same lies and distortions?

The Democrats also won by offering up moderate and even conservative candidates. This was a clever ruse, and my prediction is that it will continue in the further cultivation of these newly elected dupes as the “new face” of the Democrat party. But to give you an idea of how these “moderates” will really fare, one only needs review the career of Senator Joseph Lieberman.

It’s astounding that people would fall for this, mere months after Lieberman was savagely attacked and unceremoniously dumped by the party he served faithfully for 18 years, simply because he took a reasonable (i.e. not radical Left) position on the war. But even this is nothing new.

You might not remember, but Lieberman initially campaigned as a conservative Democrat alternative to the widely despised liberal Republican senator, Lowell Weicker. He actually received the endorsement of William F. Buckley’s National Review, and Buckley started a tongue-in-cheek movement called “Buckleys for Lieberman.” He was only half-kidding. Lieberman got many republican votes on the strength of Buckley’s endorsement.

A major plank in Lieberman’s campaign was his opposition to the minimum wage, then being considered in a bill sponsored by Ted Kennedy. Immediately following his election, Lieberman was forced to be spokesman for Kennedy’s bill. This was his first task as a newly minted Senator and rendered forever irrelevant any campaign promises he made to legislate as a conservative. He never criticized the minimum wage again. Nary a peep. Today he calls himself a liberal. He learned fast.

The Dems will be a little slicker this time. The newbies will likely get visibility as the “new face” of the Democrat party. But just as Bill Clinton created the moderate Democrat Leadership Council to make himself appear more centrist, and then completely ignored them once elected, when push comes to shove, these moderate and conservative voices will be given the choice of playing ball with the Leftists, or being put out to pasture to graze like the dull-witted cows they are. Most, like Lieberman, will play ball.

Republicans meanwhile, will assume they failed because of the conservative agenda, and foolishly try to act “moderate” as if this will prevent Democrats from attacking them in the future. Exactly the opposite is true, but it’s easier than facing the facts: that they were gutless and self-serving, and abandoned the conservative principles that got them elected in the first place and would have kept them there if they had been faithful to those principles as their campaigns promised! So now they will go along to get along, relegating the Party to second class status like it had for the fifty years prior to 1994.

The Dems will finally succeed in obtaining their socialist designs when maximum leader Hillary Clinton is elected in 2008. Don’t just expect more liberal tripe from her though. No, this time it will be for keeps. For Hillary is not a merely leftist in the mold of Nancy Pelosi, or a disingenuous individual like Ted Kennedy. She, like her odious husband, is the genuine article: a died-in-the-wool communist, trained early on in the methods, tactics and goals of the communist party by her mentor, Robert Truehaft, a longtime member of the American Communist Party, and other notables. Her hand can be seen in many of the duplicitous tactics witnessed during this campaign. But as the Dems’ own 2000 campaign platform cheered: “You ain’t seen nothin’ yet!” Ann Coulter called them the “Treason Party.” When Hillary becomes President, the true dimensions of that moniker will become apparent.

Think whatever you like of my assertions above. But the Democrat party really does have diabolical plans for us. You may have read my earlier post today regarding ACORN. Review it here. A history of ACORN is provided here. The most important element in this post is the discussion of the Cloward-Piven Strategy. The central tenet of this strategy is “to hasten the fall of capitalism by overloading the government bureaucracy with a flood of impossible demands, thus pushing society into crisis and economic collapse.”

This is the tack Democrats have taken in pushing us toward a nationalized health system. Through marginal changes in health law, the current system has gradually become so overburdened, inefficient and expensive that almost everyone is clamoring for the Feds to do something. Trouble is, they have been doing something already, and we are witnessing the result. If you think it’s bad now, wait until you get Hillarycare.

And this is just one issue. There are parallel tracks creating similar chaos in practically every other area of government. Consider what the Clintons did to the military during their previous reign. At the same time they were cutting defense budgets and personnel to the bone, the Clinton Administration sent our forces on arduous, extended “peacekeeping” and “nation building” exercises for which they were not trained, which left our troops exhausted to breaking point, and equipment broken. At the same time they pushed the envelope on all sorts of new social experiments, using the military as a test tube. One could look at this as merely foolish efforts to impose loopy leftist ideas, but the practical effect was to pull the military apart at its seams. I think Bill Clinton knew exactly what he was doing.

Some have minimized our loss with ritual reassurances: we’ll get it back in a few years; now we’ll be more motivated for 2008; look what happened after Jimmy Carter got his four years, etc. But what people don’t realize is the landscape has fundamentally shifted. It is not so much that the fundamental conservatism of the American people has changed. It hasn’t. What has changed permanently is the tactical competence of the left in its massive, coordinated efforts to delude the electorate. For the left, being two-faced, sleazy, treacherous, dishonest and duplicitous, to the borders of criminality, is nothing new. For them it is not a character flaw, it is an electoral strategy. And today that strategy has proved a resounding success.

Shame on us. Shame on the Democrat Party. Shame on America!

Freelance writer Jim Simpson is a former White House staff economist and budget analyst (1987-1993). His writings have been published in the Washington Times, FrontPage Magazine, DefenseWatch online newsletter, Soldier of Fortune magazine, Military magazine and others. You may read this and other articles by Mr. Simpson on his blog Truth and Consequences.

Hang onto your hats, folks…..or should I say guns? The quote below should be no surprise.

“[Tuesday was] a very good night for all of us who want to do something to reduce gun violence in America.” — The Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence

Bad night (what else can I say?)

Did I expect this? Not quite.

Were my predictions wrong? Yes.

The Democrats have a chance to run the Congress now. I do not want prolonged recounts because they don’t work. If Allen lost, then concede and move on.

Again, no recounts.

Sixth year incumbents have been here before. FDR in ’38. Truman in ’46. Eisenhower in ’58. Reagan in ’86.

We need to learn our lesson and move on.

We need new congressional leaders.

Last, but not least, let’s remember the real lesson of 2006. It was a big night for centrists rather than liberals.

Congratulations, Democrats. Let’s govern!

The “free ride” is over for Democrats!

It’s Wednesday morning and let’s move on.

The Democrats are now in an interesting position. They are no longer sitting in the bleachers and second guessing the manager. The Democrats are now the third base coach.

Michael Goodwin has it right Now Dems must put up – or shut up:

“The first test will be Iraq and the rest of World War III. Thumping the table and flaying Bush for his many mistakes won’t be enough anymore. Nor will demands to dump Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. Whether he stays or goes isn’t the real issue. The question is, what are we going to do about Iraq? Can we salvage a decent outcome?”

What about the Lamont wing of the party? See Tempered Democrats By Michael G. Franc:

“By June, the liberal bloggers and the Moveon.org crowd will be in full-throated rebellion and will initiate an extended national discussion of whether it was really worth it to have won back control of the House.

Speaker Pelosi will try to manage the unrealistic expectations of her base, but will find that no amount of hyped-up investigations and Star Chamber hearings will compensate for the lack of real legislative progress on the Left’s long-suppressed desire for sweeping changes.

Antiwar majorities will emerge in both the House and Senate, but, however pleasing the dominant anti-war rhetoric may sound to the Left, it will be just rhetoric.

A new Democratic-controlled Congress will not precipitously pull the troops out of Iraq.

There will be too many newly-elected Democrats from Red districts who will have to conform to the conservatism of their constituents.

Yet, though the funds will continue to flow, the constant domestic turbulence and endless reports and high-profile hearings will, in the end, prove debilitating.”

As JOHN PODHORETZ wrote:

“In Pennsylvania, Indiana and Ohio, for example, pro-life, pro-gun, pro-tax-cut Democrats took seats away from pro-life, pro-gun, pro-tax-cut Republicans.”

How vulnerable will these Democrats be in 2008 running as incumbents against John McCain or Mitt Romney? Don’t bet on all of them keeping their seats. They can not have a liberal record and keep those seats!

Cheer up. The “free ride” is over for the Democrats. They can’t blame everything on Pres. Bush anymore!

The Democrats did not win any “Profiles in Courage” in this campaign. They sat back and let the 6th year hitch and a difficult Iraq carry them in.

It worked on election day. It won’t work as a governing policy.

Also, watch for Joe Lieberman to be a very strong ally of Pres. Bush. Lieberman sees the big picture on the war on terror.

You may read this and other articles by Mr. Canto on his blog MY VIEW by Silvio Canto, Jr..

by Roy Beck, President, NumbersUSA
Wednesday 8nov06 5 a.m. EST

Here are the eight most important first things you need to know about Tuesday’s elections and how they affect the desires and efforts of all of us to get control of our borders and overall immigration numbers:

No. 1: Nearly everything about our cause got more difficult.

We lost a lot of really good allies, and a few true champions. The shift in control of the U.S. House means we go from a Speaker Hastert (R-IL) with a 96% immigration grade to a Speaker Pelosi (D-CA) with a 2% grade, the lowest of all 535 Members of Congress!

The chances of improving our quality of life by starting to limit immigration over the next two years are extremely slim. We have been thrown into even more of a defensive mode than before.

No. 2: Our allies did NOT lose because they were tough on immigration issues.

And House Republicans were not turned out of the majority because they stood against Pres. Bush and Democrats to stop their giant amnesty plans.

We can be sure of that because of scientific polling in more than a dozen battleground districts and states this fall. The surveys by The Polling Company found that in competitive races, large majorities of Democrats and Independents, and even larger majorities of Republicans, agreed with our positions on combatting illegal immigration and on reducing overall numbers.

I already started to hear a little bit of toxic spin in the TV commentary over the night. I am sure that Tamar Jacoby, the Wall Street Journal and other ubiquitous open-borders commentators will try to say that the losses of immigration-restriction candidates like Randy Graf and J.D. Hayworth in Arizona and John Hostettler in Indiana prove that hard-line positions against illegal immigration are losers.

But there is no logic in that. The polls showed that voters in the competitive districts, including in Arizona, agreed with us on immigration. If they agreed with us, why would they punish a candidate for also agreeing with us? They wouldn’t. Obviously, other factors (the war & scandal) were the driving forces behind the big Party shift.

No. 3: Rather than weakening Pres. Bush’s resolve and ability to enact horrible expansions of immigration and rewards for illegal immigration, the Republicans’ loss of the House seems to have emboldened the President.

The White House already sees a silver lining in having caused Republicans to lose control of the House: It was the House Republicans who blocked Pres. Bush’s immigration plans. White House aides were saying through the late evening that one good thing for the President is that, without a Republican majority, Pres. Bush may be able to push through his massive foreign labor importation plan with Democratic Speaker Pelosi’s help.

You could almost hear the glee in those White House reports that Republican Hastert will no longer be in the Speaker’s chair.

No. 4: Now is the time for our Democratic (and Independent) faxer activists to step forward with your best influence.

For the last six years, our most important efforts were in trying to influence the Republican leaders of the House and the Senate, while secondarily working to build up a sizeable minority of Democratic supporters in Congress.

Now, our most immediate concern will be in persuading Democratic leaders that it is not in their best political intersests to bring to a vote the radical open-borders legislation they have been pushing the last several years.

All of you with any form at all of credibility with Democratic leaders are going to need to do all you can to reach them and help them see how it not only is politically foolhardy to push the open-borders agenda but bad for principles they hold most dear.

No. 5: NumbersUSA is ready to carry the battle forward with a special emphasis on a Democratic strategy.

When every part of government was controlled by Republicans, we were sometimes questioned about why we were spending so much time building up a Democratic membership and Democratic staff.

Well, aren’t we all glad that we did.

We already have a Democratic Team working on the Hill, as well as our Republican Team, each with experience working in congressional offices of their respective Parties.

For three or four months now, some of our closest Republican allies have confided quite confidentially to us that everything they saw and all information from behind the scenes that they received suggested to them that the Democrats were going to take control of the House this fall.

Because of that, we have worked up a general strategy for how we proceed. We were not caught off guard by the election results. And we are not thrown off balance. We are ready to work with you in this new political environment to do the best we can for our country, for ourselves and family, for our fellow citizens in this national community and for our posterity.

No. 6: Republican activists will still have a crucial role to play.

On nearly every winning vote we are able to achieve the next two years, a large majority of the votes on our side will have to come from Republicans.

It will be the special task of Republican faxers and all voters who are represented by Republicans to persuade them to vote as a nearly monolithic bloc against any form of amnesty, mass guestworker programs or increases in legal immigration.

We are going to need to keep about 90% of Republican House Members voting with us most of the time to block the bad legislation and amnesties (with Blue Dog and other more independent minded Democrats providing the rest of the votes to equal 218).

No. 7: Over the next few days, we will be giving you some things to do to start influencing the new power structure here in Washington.

There is no reason for despair although there are plenty of temptations to yield to it.

We cannot throw up our hands and say “all is lost, things can’t get much worse.” Well, out-of-control immigration IS making things worse every year and will continue to do so until we start rolling back the annual settlement of some 2 million — both illegal and legal immigrants.

All of us citizen groups together over the past year pulled off a political miracle and stopped all forms of an amnesty that was supported by nearly all the powerful institutions of the country.

The evidence is clear that the majority of voters are with us — it’s just that they made decisions Tuesday that send to us a particularly difficult Congress to deal with. As citizen activists, we have to deal with the Congress that the voters send to us.

No. 8: The Democratic takeover may finally enable vigorous oversight over the Bush Administration’s failure to secure our borders, secure our greencard and visa system and to provide robust interior enforcement of our immigration laws.

We had some great Republicans in the House trying to prod, push and plead with the Administration for better enforcement.

But the GOP leadership would never allow the oversight to be strong enough to embarrass the Administration to be forced to enforce the laws.

The Democrats may appreciate the chance to embarrass the Bush Administration.

Many of you may not be all that aware of the extent to which NumbersUSA is building a department of professionals to assist with congressional oversight of the Administration. The majority of news reports this past year that have questioned the Administration’s handling of immigration have been generated by our NumbersUSA team.

We look forward to helping the Democrats expose the Bush Administration’s weaknesses in protecting the physical and economic security of the American people through its lax handling of immigration matters.

CONTINUING THE FIGHT,

– ROY

To participate in our activism, visit NumbersUSA

View the NumbersUSA special grid of Competitive Race Results

The following is just the tip of the iceberg, but it is an apt example of the kind of behind-the-scenes dirty pool that has allowed the Democrats to stay in the game, and helped put them over the top, when they should have been put out to pasture forever with the elections of 1994.

Republicans, as usual, have been too stupid overall to see the political advocacy group ACORN for the internal saboteur it is, some even supporting legislation that would have guaranteed ACORN a huge annual subsidy from the Federal Government. Fortunately, the do-nothing Senate failed to do anything on this bill too.

Read this article — Grapes of Rathke at the WSJ Opinion Journal.

JOHN FUND ON THE TRAIL

Grapes of Rathke
Acorn, a liberal activist group, comes under scrutiny. About time.

Wednesday, November 8, 2006 12:01 a.m. EST

The Democratic oak has grown, in part, from Acorn, a feisty, union-backed activist group. The organization says on its Web site that it “registered over 540,000 low-income and minority voters” and deployed over 4,000 get-out-the-vote workers for yesterday’s elections. But after years of scandal involving its election efforts and misuse of government grants, Acorn is finally coming under scrutiny, with four of its Kansas City, Mo., workers under indictment for submitting false voter registrations. (As of this writing, all are at large.) Other states–including Pennsylvania and Maryland–are also conducting probes. Notes the U.S. attorney’s office in Kansas City: “This national investigation is very much ongoing.”….

For background, here is a bio on Wade Rathke — A Guide To The Political Left: Wade Rathke.

….Wade Rathke is one of the most powerful – yet least known – of America’s hard-Left activists. As leader and founder of America’s largest radical group, ACORN; co-founder and chairman of the Tides Center; board member of the Tides Foundation; executive board member of SEIU and chairman of the AFL-CIO’s Organizers Forum, Rathke exerts influence over three major chokepoints of leftist power: radical foundations; radical public-sector unions; and activist foot-soldiers in the streets.

One reason that major media may shrink from shining too bright a light on Rathke’s achievements is that he has a disconcerting penchant for blunt talk – disconcerting at least to those who would hide the left’s appetite for violence and lawlessness that Rathke epitomizes.

At one point during the Florida recount crisis of 2000, Miami-Dade’s all-Democrat canvassing board attempted to move the recount into a room too small for reporters or Republican observers to squeeze in. At the same time, they announced that since they lacked time to hand-count all ballots, they would only count some ballots – presumably those that went for Gore.

The ensuing uproar in which pink-cheeked Republican frat boys in neckties pounded on the counting room door and an angry crowd of Cuban-Americans gathered outside the building demanding entry persuaded the nervous canvassing board to back down from their illegal plan – and likely stopped the Democrats from stealing the election….

Here is an outline of the strategy and true purpose of the organization — CLOWARD-PIVEN STRATEGY:

Strategy for forcing political change through orchestrated crisis

First proposed in 1966 and named after Columbia University sociologists Richard Andrew Cloward and Frances Fox Piven, the “Cloward-Piven Strategy” seeks to hasten the fall of capitalism by overloading the government bureaucracy with a flood of impossible demands, thus pushing society into crisis and economic collapse.

Inspired by the August 1965 riots in the black district of Watts in Los Angeles (which erupted after police had used batons to subdue an African American man suspected of drunk driving), Cloward and Piven published an article titled “The Weight of the Poor: A Strategy to End Poverty” in the May 2, 1966 issue of The Nation. Following its publication, The Nation sold an unprecedented 30,000 reprints. Activists were abuzz over the so-called “crisis strategy” or “Cloward-Piven Strategy,” as it came to be called. Many were eager to put it into effect.

In their 1966 article, Cloward and Piven charged that the ruling classes used welfare to weaken the poor; that by providing a social safety net, the rich doused the fires of rebellion. Poor people can advance only when “the rest of society is afraid of them,” Cloward told The New York Times on September 27, 1970. Rather than placating the poor with government hand-outs, wrote Cloward and Piven, activists should work to sabotage and destroy the welfare system; the collapse of the welfare state would ignite a political and financial crisis that would rock the nation; poor people would rise in revolt; only then would “the rest of society” accept their demands.

The key to sparking this rebellion would be to expose the inadequacy of the welfare state. Cloward-Piven’s early promoters cited radical organizer Saul Alinsky as their inspiration. “Make the enemy live up to their (sic) own book of rules,” Alinsky wrote in his 1989 book Rules for Radicals. When pressed to honor every word of every law and statute, every Judaeo-Christian moral tenet, and every implicit promise of the liberal social contract, human agencies inevitably fall short. The system’s failure to “live up” to its rule book can then be used to discredit it altogether, and to replace the capitalist “rule book” with a socialist one….

You may read articles by Mr. Simpson on his blog Truth and Consequences.