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Conservative

Change and Hope

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by Ken Connor

The results are in, and in the words of former President George W. Bush, it was a thumping.  What this nation witnessed on November 2nd was not merely a wave election, it was a tsunami.  The obvious beneficiary of the voter’s frustration this time around was the GOP, but as many have emphasized, it would be a huge mistake to interpret the outcome of this election as a mandate for the Republican establishment to carry on with business as usual.

As I cast my ballot on Election Day, it was difficult to shake feelings of trepidation and cynicism, despite the energy that has animated my fellow conservatives in the past several months.  According to a new poll, I wasn’t alone.  A record 75% of voters surveyed prior to the midterm elections feel that things are not going well in America.  Now that the suspense is over and the dust has settled, many questions remain.  Is the uncertainty and doubt that has characterized the mood of the American people something that the new crop of reformers can overcome?  Are these newly elected agents of the people ready to do the work, take the chances, and make the sacrifices necessary to bring about real change in the way our government does its business?  Will the American people’s vote of confidence be rewarded, or betrayed?

In the immediate aftermath of an election, it’s difficult to tell whether or not the campaign pledges that landed a winning candidate in office will go on to guide their service, or be left on the cutting room floor.  For the next couple of months, the winning candidates will bask in their victory and recover from the rigors of the campaign trail.  But come January, the American people will be anxious to see if their representatives meant what they said.

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GOP Poised to Reap Redistricting Rewards

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by Michael Barone

Let’s try to put some metrics on last Tuesday’s historic election. Two years ago, the popular vote for the House of Representatives was 54 percent Democratic and 43 percent Republican. That may sound close, but in historic perspective it’s a landslide. Democrats didn’t win the House popular vote in the South, as they did from the 1870s up through 1992. But they won a larger percentage in the 36 non-Southern states than — well, as far as I can tell, than ever before.

This year we don’t yet know the House popular vote down to the last digit, partly because California takes five weeks these days to count all its votes (Brazil, which voted last Sunday, counted its votes in less than five hours). But the exit poll had it at 52 percent Republican and 46 percent Democratic, which is probably within a point or so of the final number.

That’s similar to 1994, and you have to go back to 1946 and 1928 to find years when Republicans did better. And the numbers those years aren’t commensurate since the then-segregated and Democratic South cast few popular votes. So you could argue that this is the best Republican showing ever.

Nationally, Republicans narrowly missed winning Senate seats in heavily Democratic Washington and in Nevada and California, where less problematic nominees might have won. As in all wave years, they missed winning half a dozen House seats by a whisker (or a suddenly discovered bunch of ballots).

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A Return to the Norm

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by Charles Krauthammer

 For all the turmoil, the spectacle, the churning — for all the old bulls slain and fuzzy-cheeked freshmen born — the great Republican wave of 2010 is simply a return to the norm. The tide had gone out; the tide came back. A center-right country restores the normal congressional map: a sea of interior red, bordered by blue coasts and dotted by blue islands of ethnic/urban density.
    
Or to put it numerically, the Republican wave of 2010 did little more than undo the two-stage Democratic wave of 2006-2008 in which the Democrats gained 54 House seats combined (precisely the size of the anti-Democratic wave of 1994). In 2010 the Democrats gave it all back, plus about an extra 10 seats or so for good — chastening — measure.
    
The conventional wisdom is that these sweeps represent something novel, exotic and very modern — the new media, faster news cycles, Internet frenzy and a public with a short attention span and even less patience with government. Or alternatively, that these violent swings reflect reduced party loyalty and more independent voters.

Nonsense. In 1946, for example, when party loyalty was much stronger and even television was largely unknown, the Republicans gained 56 seats and then lost 75 in the very next election. Waves come. Waves go. The republic endures.

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Oklahoma Bans Sharia Law

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by Connie Hair

Voters have passed an amendment to the Oklahoma state constitution to ban the use of Islamic Sharia law in the state courts by an overwhelming 70% of the vote.  The amendment also bars judges from using foreign law in rendering decisions.

Seen as a pre-emptive strike, Oklahoma now joins Louisiana in blocking Sharia law, a draconian legal doctrine that does not recognize the most basic human rights as measured by any Western standard.

As previously reported on HUMAN EVENTS, free speech rights are under assault worldwide through violence, threats of violence, and Sharia-compliant “incitement” laws.

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Obama and the Democrat Freefall

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by Michelle Malkin

Take Your Olive Branch and Shove It, Democrats

On the eve of a historic midterm election upheaval, President Barack Obama tried to walk back his gratuitous slap at Americans who oppose his radical progressive agenda. “I probably should have used the word ‘opponents’ instead of ‘enemies’ to describe political adversaries,” Obama admitted Monday. “Probably”?

Here is an ironclad certainty: It’s too little too late for the antagonist-in-chief to paper over two years of relentless Democratic incivility and hate toward his domestic “enemies.” Voters have spoken: They’ve had enough. Enough of the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize winner’s rhetorical abuse. Enough of his feints at bipartisanship. Whatever the final tally, this week’s turnover in Congress is a GOP mandate for legislative pugilism, not peace. Voters have had enough of big government meddlers “getting things done.” They are sending fresh blood to the nation’s Capitol to get things undone.

Just two short years ago, Obama campaigned as the transcendent unifier. “Young and old, rich and poor, Democrat and Republican, black, white, Hispanic, Asian, Native American, gay, straight, disabled and not disabled, Americans have sent a message to the world that we have never been just a collection of red states and blue states,” he proclaimed. “We have been and always will be the United States of America.”

It’s been an Us vs. Them freefall ever since.

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We’re All Bigots Now

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by Ann Coulter

After Tuesday’s election, the fresh new faces of the Democratic Party are … Harry Reid and Jerry Brown! (Who had the worst election night? Chuck Schumer, who’s been waiting in the wings to replace Reid as Senate majority leader. Who had the second worst election night? The people who live below Barney Frank’s apartment.)

With the addition of new Republican senators Ron Johnson (Wisconsin), Rand Paul (Kentucky) and Marco Rubio (Florida) — among others — the average IQ of Senate Republicans has just increased by about 20 points. Also, liberals won’t have Sharron Angle to kick around anymore. Now that Angle, Christine O’Donnell, Meg Whitman and Carly Fiorina are gone, Keith Olbermann is indefinitely suspending his “Worst Persons of the World” segment.

Republicans added two magnificent new black faces to the Congress with Allen West in Florida, who beat sore loser Ron Klein 54.3 percent to 45.7 percent (with 97 percent counted, Klein wouldn’t concede), and Tim Scott in South Carolina, who crushed Democrat Ben Frasier, 65-29.

Republicans also launched two new Hispanic stars this election: Sen.-elect Marco Rubio from Florida and the new governor of New Mexico, Susanna Martinez. And we got a bonus Sikh — Nikki Haley, the new governor of South Carolina. MSNBC is still searching for the “Republicans are racist” angle in all of this.

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Broder’s Brainstorm

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By Patrick J. Buchanan

Though Obama “may lose control of Congress,” says columnist David Broder, he “can still storm back to win a second term in 2012.”

How does Broder suggest Obama go about it?

“Look back at FDR and the Great Depression. What finally resolved that economic crisis? World War II.”

Conceding the prospect of a new war is “frightening,” Broder goes on to list the rich rewards of Obama’s emulating FDR.

“With strong Republican support in Congress for challenging Iran’s ambition to become a nuclear power, (Obama) can spend much of 2011 and 2012 orchestrating a showdown with the mullahs. This will help him politically because the opposition party will be urging him on. And as tensions rise and we accelerate preparations for war, the economy will improve…

“(T)he nation will rally around Obama because Iran is the greatest threat to the world in the young century. If he can confront this threat and contain Iran’s nuclear ambitions, he will have made the world safer and may be regarded as one of the most successful presidents in history.”

Cynicism aside, what is wrong with Broder’s analysis?

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Guess Who?

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by Thomas Sowell

Guess who said the following: “We have tried spending money. We are spending more than we have ever spent before and it does not work.” Was it Sarah Palin? Rush Limbaugh? Karl Rove?

Not even close. It was Henry Morgenthau, Secretary of the Treasury under Franklin D. Roosevelt and one of FDR’s closest advisers. He added, “after eight years of this Administration we have just as much unemployment as when we started. . . And an enormous debt to boot!”

This is just one of the remarkable and eye-opening facts in a must-read book titled “New Deal or Raw Deal?” by Professor Burton W. Folsom, Jr., of Hillsdale College.

Ordinarily, what happened in the 1930s might be something to be left for historians to be concerned about. But the very same kinds of policies that were tried– and failed– during the 1930s are being carried out in Washington today, with the advocates of such policies often invoking FDR’s New Deal as a model.

Franklin D. Roosevelt blamed the country’s woes on the problems he inherited from his predecessor, much as Barack Obama does today. But unemployment was 20 percent in the spring of 1939, six long years after Herbert Hoover had left the White House.

Whole generations have been “educated” to believe that the Roosevelt administration is what got this country out of the Great Depression. History text books by famous scholars like Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., of Harvard and Henry Steele Commager of Columbia have enshrined FDR as a historic savior of this country, and lesser lights in the media and elsewhere have perpetuated the legend.

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Obama’s Economists Missed What Voters Plainly Saw

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by Michael Barone

Heading into what appears to be a disastrous midterm election, the Obama Democrats profess to be puzzled. The president’s record, they insist, is moderate, accommodating — if anything, overcautious. So why do most American voters seem to be angrily rejecting it?

That’s one way of looking at it. Another way is to say that the Obama administration and the Democratic Congress have increased government’s share of gross domestic product from 21 percent, where it’s hovered for the last several decades, to about 25 percent and have put the national debt on a trajectory to increase from 40 to 90 percent of GDP.

Voters have noticed — and don’t like it.

But, say the Obama Democrats, shouldn’t ordinary people — in particular, shouldn’t the blue-collar working class — be grateful to a government that tries to “spread the wealth” (Obama’s words to Joe the Plumber) in difficult economic times?

They used to be, the argument would go. In post-World War II America, voters regularly moved toward the Democrats in recession years.

There’s a difference, however, that has escaped Obama Democrats but perhaps not ordinary voters.

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Left’s Tolerance Limited to Liberals

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by Ken Connor

The Good Book tells us that pride goes before a fall, and with the midterm elections looming perhaps nothing encapsulates the truth of this maxim more than the leadership of the Democrat Party and its constituency of liberal media elites.  The Left’s inability to engage opposing views with seriousness and respect and their unwillingness to tolerate divergent opinions within their own ranks reveal an ugly intolerance lurking beneath their veneer of open-mindedness, an intolerance that has fueled the continued, rapid growth of the Tea Party and all but sealed the electoral fate of many Democrats come November 2nd.

A new series of advertisements for MSNBC on the airwaves this week captures perfectly the kind of paternalistic condescension that’s crippling the Left in the eyes of so many American people.  The ads are intended to communicate the spirit of progress that guides the network, and to set MSNBC above and apart from it’s chief competition and ideological nemesis, Fox News.  In airing these ads, MSNBC is essentially extending an invitation to the American people.  “Join us” they say, in our quest to “move forward” towards a better America for all.  There’s only one small problem.  According the ideological litmus test imposed by the network, vast segments of the American population don’t qualify to participate in MSNBC’s vision.

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