National Party News

On the David Asman show last night, Ron Paul was asked what plans he and son Rand had for the new term. He said they had talked about entering legislation together in the Senate and the House on the first day. Half joking, Ron Paul said his son suggested legislation to “end the Fed.”

I think it was St. Paul or maybe Kurt Cobain who said, “There is no such thing as a joke.” They might think of doing just that. Certainly it would not pass, but it would set a benchmark allowing them to graph progress from now into the future.

The Democrats are now disassembling like a Brad Childress crazy train. They were given a choice back leading into 2008 with two clearly outlined paths. The one from Thomas F. Schaller in his book Whistling Past Dixie: How Democrats Can Win Without the South. The other by Democratic strategists Steve Jardin and Dave “Mudcat” Saunders in their book Foxes in the Henhouse: How the Republicans Stole the South and the Heartland and What the Democrats Must Do to Run ’em Out. Quite obviously they followed the Schaller path. Jardin and Saunders warned that ignoring the South and the heartland was immoral and would have catastrophic consequences for the Democratic Party. It has done worse than that. Today, Democratic analyst and commentator Pat Caddell calls the situation in the heartland “prerevolutionary.”

For well more than a century, Americans have had a choice like that in an old general store I used to go to in rural West Virginia with a swinging sign that read, “Ice cream, guns and ammo.” The ice cream came in two flavors, vanilla and chocolate. That has been our choice in political parties as well.

As of Nov. 2, there will be a new flavor: Libertarian. It is already there. It has fully metabolized into the mainstream. Although not a Libertarian, Sarah Palin is the La Passionara of this new awakening, and Ron Paul, banned from the discussion in 2008, the Gray Champion. At first, that is when she was being called a slut by David Letterman and regularly mocked by Tina Fey, the eagle-eyed op-ed writers of the NYTs sounded a clarion. One of their most capable, the one who lives abroad, said it recalled to him those bad days when the broody earth spirits began to arise in the gnostic German heart. I am sure he was not talking about the Moravians. But today, in only two years, we are merely considered “extremists.” Now, that is pilgrim’s progress. Read more...

Liberal arrogance continues to humor and entertain us in this volatile and hostile midterm election cycle.

During a recent Tea Party rally, Sarah Palin said, “Don’t party like it’s 1773 yet!” Liberal intellectual superiority couldn't wait to pounce on Palin's supposed historical gaffe. Their media and blogosphere machine went into full-frontal attack trying to make a fool of Palin for getting the date wrong on what they assumed was a reference to the signing of the Declaration of Independence in 1776. Read more...

This might seem like a simplistic truism, but I think it is worth noting that there are more Asians in the world than any other group of people.

The number of Asians living in Asia is rapidly approaching 4 billion. There are 1.3 billion Chinese and almost as many Indians.

But the Asians are not staying in Asia. They are emigrating in search of a better life for themselves and their families, and many of them are ending up in America.

The Tea Party is coming to town. The number of seats won Nov. 2 by Tea Party-backed candidates doesn't matter; the movement is coming to Washington and will dramatically alter the Republican Conference in the House as well as the one in the Senate.

House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio) knows this and has seen it coming. Even if he doesn't become Speaker, he will be leading a more conservative group of Republicans. Since he wants to win as many seats as possible and to become Speaker, Boehner started giving to Tea Party candidates even before some of them won primary races against establishment candidates, according to today's Washington Post.

In Peggy Noonan’s excellent column for The Wall Street Journal this morning, she writes that “the Tea Party is not a ‘threat’ to the Republican Party, the Tea Party ‘saved’ the Republican Party.”

As far as saving the party, she can thank Sarah Palin for that, as it was she who singlehandedly folded the funky and the grass roots in with the mainstream, exactly as she said at the first must be done, and only she could have done it.

Several months ago, when the Tea Party crusade hit its stride with a Kentucky primary win by Rand Paul to succeed retiring Sen. Jim Bunning (R), the left went out of its way to link Paul as the puppet behind a larger Republican machine. Democrat operatives quickly labeled Paul and his style of politics as wholly indicative of what the GOP had become.
 
As predicted, Republicans had reverted to their old-school style of hate politics, the storyline went, making this November a clear choice between “policies of the past” versus the future.

I spent much of Saturday at the big liberal rally in Washington, a very good day, a very strong crowd, a sign that the Democratic base is alive and well.

For now I would make one simple point, which I believe is extremely revealing and important.