Hewitt Blog

 

This is an appeal to join the hundreds of thousands who have already signed up at WinningInNovember via the banner above or to the side, and to help build the virtual network that will push for a U-Turn from President Obama's and Nancy Pelosi's current policies.

My conversation with Charles Krauthammer from Friday's program about Mayor Bloomberg and the mosque will be transcribed and posted here later today. I have also opened a thread on the debate at the Hughniverse's blog.

The news surrounding the mosque and, from the opposite coast, marriage, obscured the story that erupted midweek from Missouri: 72% of voters in that state's election turned thumbs down on Obamacare. 

And that was before another terrible jobs report and another senior official's resignation from the president's "inner circle" of economic advisors.  The gang that promised that the stimulus would prevent unemployment from rising above 8% are stuck with a 9.5% that feels like 15%.

The president's plan?  Raises taxes massively in January.  And keep passing out the pork to special interest friends of Democrats everywhere.

As economist Brian Wesbury noted on yesterday's show, markets do not yet believe that the GOP will take the House or make large gains in the Senate.  Robust economic growth will not return until small business owners and investors believe that the government will stop acting so haphazardly and with such confiscatory zeal.  

A return to growth requires a massive change in the makeup of Congress.

WinningInNovember  is a project of Americans for Prosperity that will help millions of Americans impact the vote via specific directions on what simple steps to take to push free market, pro-growth candidates over the next 80 days. President Obama's virtual organization has lost a great deal of its energy as his policies have driven the country into a deep malaise, but pro-growth activists have not yet organized around the fall campaign.

That is changing right now with the roll-out of this new technology.  Please join me in using some of your time between now and November to assure that Missouri's vote on Tuesday turns out to have been a predictor and not an abberation.

UPDATE: A reminder from Powerline's Scott Johnson of what the country gets when its mainstream sits out an election --Al Franken presiding over the Senate as a desperately attention-needy clown.
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From Patheos.com's Timothy Dalrymple: "Prop 8: Three Options for Social Conservatives."

Also from Patheos, a symposium on the future of Evangelicalism.

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Target has now apologized for contributing to a pro-business, pro-Tom Emmer for Governor in Minnesota group, which gives me a second reason not to shop in the stores that banned the Salvation Army at Christmas a few years back.

Would it have been that hard for the CEO to say that the company believes in free enterprise and that, especially in these times, the home to its headquarters needs a competent governor committed to economic growth?

Emmer deserves all the support that timid business execs won't give him, so please stop by his website and contribute.  Emmer is on today's program in the first hour.


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At the end of the Reagan years I was living in Great Falls and the proximity to the Manassas battlefield brought me an awareness of the long struggle by preservationists to protect the battlefield and the lands near it.  In the late '80s the debate was over shopping centers and traffic.

That struggle eventually grew into a show down with Disney and brought about a comprehensive land use plan for the region.  Similar efforts sprang up to protect Antietam to the north in Maryland.  An excellent history of both is provided by Nalat Phanit here.

The Gettysburg battlefield has long been the subject of land use planning and land use disputes.  Most recently, a controversy has been running for many years surrounding efforts to build a casino near the battlefield.

Just last year a land use battle raged around a proposed museum on private land adjacent to Valley Forge.

Thus the controversy over the Ground Zero Mosque is just another in a long series of debates about how to protect space sacred to all Americans.  Mayor Bloomberg's illiberal attempt to shout down critics of the GZM as bigots notwithstanding, the opposition to GZM and all other inappropriate uses of the area surrounding the site where America was attacked has powerful precedents on which to draw.

Shopping centers, theme parks, museums and casinos are all appropriate targets of hostility for preservationists, and the arguments arrayed against them was almost never that the use proposed was intrinsically wrong, but simply in the wrong place.  That is the debate about GZM, and it isn't an attack on Islam or the Constitution to demand local state and federal efforts to preserve a battlefield from competing uses.

 

Peggy Noonan writes, effortlessly and eloquently as always, on the malaise gripping the 45 gang on the subject of America's future.

A stunning, two paragraph solar plexus punch summary of our times:

Parents now fear something has stopped. They think they lived through the great abundance, a time of historic growth in wealth and material enjoyment. They got it, and they enjoyed it, and their kids did, too: a lot of toys in that age, a lot of Xboxes and iPhones. (Who is the most self-punishing person in America right now? The person who didn't do well during the abundance.) But they look around, follow the political stories and debates, and deep down they think their children will live in a more limited country, that jobs won't be made at a great enough pace, that taxes—too many people in the cart, not enough pulling it—will dishearten them, that the effects of 30 years of a low, sad culture will leave the whole country messed up. And then there is the world: nuts with nukes, etc.

Optimists think that if we manage to turn a few things around, their kids may have it . . . almost as good. The country they inherit may be . . . almost as good. And it's kind of a shock to think like this; pessimism isn't in our DNA. But it isn't pessimism, really, it's a kind of tough knowingness, combined, in most cases, with a daily, personal commitment to keep plugging.

This widespread feeling combines with outrage at disconnected Manhattan-Beltway-LA elites to produce the conditions for an electoral upheval. And at the front edge of that outrage is where the GOP still has an enormous task not yet even begun. (And one reason why the arrival as head of the party of an energetic optimist like Norm Coleman cannot come soon enough, or a presidential campaign full of optimistic assessments from Daniels, Pawlenty, Romney and Thune and every other would-be nominee.)

The opposition to where we have been brought by Obama-Pelosi-Reid so accurately described by Noonan has to describe where we can in fact go if we are serious and purposeful.

In fact the distribution of massive amounts of empowering technology across the globe and throughout America does make it possible that the future of the country and of the West will be extraordinarily, mind-bogglingly vibrant.

There is also a rising new leadership class led by veterans of the success in Iraq, of the silent war against extremism around the world, and of the determined and still ongoing battle in Iraq that will re-energize Washington within a decade or at most two.  (Read the Team Rubicon posts from the Burma border in the days ahead if you want to see the sort of people the country has raised up by the tens of thousands who do not often make the MSM's radar.)

But the Congressional GOP needs to know and embrace that it will need to move very fast if it emerges with a big win on November 2, and that the battle over the direction and suffocating size of the federal government will have to be joined immediately, and fought with a pace and a determination that was lacking throughout the Bush years, when the good but amiable and very slow leadership team of Hastert/Lott-Frist treated their majorities as eternal and their job as to support the president in the war in the first term and on all other things conduct business as usual.  

Energy produces energy.  The reason the Democrats are out of gas and out of luck headed into the last 88 days of the campaign is that they have no plan, no strategy and no leadership.  The GOP's Congressional leadership will have to show America that there is a way out of this mess even if the president and his team are blocking it until 2013.

We have seen this play before and it ends well.  If you have a Reagan, (and if that Reagan has a Noonan, a Robinson, etc).

UPDATE: Article VI Blog also reacted to Noonan'spiece this morning.
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National Review's Jay Nordlinger provides an essay on the malignancies within JournoList. I had focused in a Washington Examiner column two weeks ago on just one of the problems presented by the slice of JournoList emails we have seen, and Nordlinger's explanation of the various ills exposed by the leaks is far more comprehensive and damning.

I offer Nordlinger's take it to Tucker Carlson as an addendum to our conversation on air yesterday. (Transcript here.)  All of the JournoList emails The Daily Caller has should be published so writers like Nordlinger could sift them with an eye on what they tell us.  Carlson and his team have an important archive, but are only allowing the public to see into one drawer, and perhaps even then only some of the papers in the drawer.

It is like opening one wing of a large museum, and covering some of the paintings even in that one.

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Updates are available at the Team Rubcion website.

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Talking about the U-Turn election that is coming with Martha McCallum filling in for Megyn Kelly, Hugh gets a good line in about the lack of wisdom shown in the Prop. 8 decision.

 

The New York Times has a story on Colorado Senator Michael Bennet's tenure as head of the Denver public schools which will raise serious questions about his judgment and damage his chances for the Democratic nomination despite President Obama's strong endorsement and efforts on Bennet's behalf.

Bennet and his team led the Denver schools into a risky financial scheme appropriate for private investors risking private money.  As a custodian of public funds, Bennet ought never to have placed what amounts to a bet on interest rates.  Recall that this scheme was put into place years after the 1994 bankruptcy of the County of Orange, California, brought about by a county treasurer --also a Democrat-- making interest rate bets with taxpayer money.

This story should hand the election to left-winger Andrew Romanoff, and almost certainly would have had it been published in a timely fashion, at the start of the period of mail-in balloting in the Rocky Mountain State, which was July 19. 

How long has the Times been sitting on this damaging story about an incumbent senator facing a stiff primary challenge with ballots being cast for more than two weeks?

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