Like an alcoholic who just had an intervention from his family, Republicans in Washington D.C. are trying to figure out what is next. They are sending out esteemed messengers to fan out into the hinterlands to find out how to bring back the winning formula, or that old time religion, or some new or updated Reagan message. Anything to get disillusioned Republicans to drink the fools brew again.

And so it is that on December 28, 2008 @ 7:00 PM at ”Rising Tide - Special Winter Event with Senator David Vitter” The GOP will be come to the Bay Area, hat in hand, to  discuss the future of the Republican Party.

This is the annual even that is usually held in the spring at the wonderful home of Mayor Chuck Marsala of Atherton. David Vitter is an interesting choice to travel out West to discuss the future of the GOP because he is part and parcel of what is wrong with the Republican Party. Vitter is the junior US. Senator from Louisiana. Formerly a member of the US. House of Representatives, first elected in 1999, representing Louisiana’s 1st Congressional District, Vitter was first elected to the Senate in 2004.

If the Republican Party is really interersted in changing, why are they sending Vitter? No doubt he is an attractive and well spoken man. Yet he is also part of the problem with the D.C. GOP. Vitter was elected to the US House of Representatives and the US. Senate as a pro Family Values, School Prayer supporting, Pro Life, anti gay, gun-toting, anti-illegal Conservative. Sounds great. He probably loves Sarah Palin too. But lest we forget, during the 2004 Senate campaign, Vitter was accused by a member of the Louisiana Republican State Central Committee of having had a lengthy affair with a prostitute in New Orleans. Vitter responded that the allegation was “absolutely and completely untrue” and that it was “just crass Louisiana politics.”

Really? This is the type of self righteousness that has made the Republican party great against the Godless Democrats!!

In early July 2007, Vitter’s phone number was included in a published list of phone records of Pamela Martin and Associates, a company owned and run by Deborah Jeane Palfrey, also known as the “D.C. Madam,” convicted by the U.S. government for running a prostitution service. Hustler Magazine identified the phone number and contacted Vitter’s office to ask about his connection to Palfrey. Vitter issued this statement:

This was a very serious sin in my past for which I am, of course, completely responsible. Several years ago, I asked for and received forgiveness from God and my wife in confession and marriage counseling. Out of respect for my family, I will keep my discussion of the matter there - with God and them. But I certainly offer my deep and sincere apologies to all I have disappointed and let down in any way.

 Ah yes…. God as the last refuge of a scoundrel!!

This event should really be called ebbing tide. Because Vitter is part and parcle of the the kind of politicians who will look at the grassroots of the GOP as boobs as they preach family values to the believers while they parade around Washington D.C. with prostitues on each arm, living the high life under the guise of representing conservative values.

I would have respected Vitter more if he had resigned at that point. I will never forget the press confrence he held with his wife at his side. The humilition was written on her face. I wonder if Vitter has any guilt over the exploitaton of the women he used. It is sickening.

So. Now he is coming to California to preach and tell us poor bedraggled Republicans who have no party representation in the Bay Area how the brilliant Republican minds in Washington D. C. are going to lead us out of this morass. Who is to visit us next? Larry Craig and Ted Stephens? I have a suggestion. We need to attend this event and send a message to Vitter. He needs to be told that he needs to go the way of Craig and Stephens as we remake the Republican Party into a party the American people can believe in again!!

If you want to send Vitter and the DC Republicans a message please go to this event you can register at:

www.eventbee.com/view/ risingtide/ event?eventid=54395 

Just copy and paste this into your browser.

In many ways the California Republican Party and their elected leaders are similar to the current attendees at an Oakland Raider game. The only folks who attend Raider games anymore are the diehard true believers in the Raider Nation. Raider fans are a wonderful bunch of people who love the Raiders no matter what the outcome of the game or the season. Their current slogan at tailgate a parties at the Oakland Coliseum (or whatever corporate name they are using these days) is, “It is not about football. It’s a Raider game!” I have to wonder, as I watch the California Republican party continue to shrink down to its base of true believer conservatives if their slogan ought to be, “It is not about winning elections, it is about being ideologically perfect!”

With this attitude, no wonder California Republicans can’t even win one for the Gipper!

If things don’t change soon the question will be if California Republicans on the verge of extinction in the Golden State? They certainly are in the Bay Area. As I stated last week if Abram Wilson does not win in the 15th Assembly District say good bye any partisan seat in the Bay Area.

Recently State Assembly leader Mike Villines showed up for a campaign event for Abram Wilson. Republican leader Mike Villines seems like a nice enough person. I have had the occasion to meet him in the past. He is even well thought of by many of the State Democrats. He gave a typical red meat speech about how they triumphed on the budget over the Democrats. But the facts are that the Republicans in Sacramento have not mattered for a long time. The only time they have anything to do is at budget time. The rest of the time nobody cares. Republicans could be off playing Texas Hold-Em in a corner of the capitol or at one of their retreats in Lake Tahoe (Nevada Side). Things have become so bad for the vaunted GOP Caucus Republicans that many Democrats are worried that there will not be any type of loyal opposition to even marginally shape legislation.

So here is a proposal to help the Republican Caucus in Sacramento. I know this sounds crazy, but I believe that the Democrats in charge of the state legislature in Sacramento should create an Affirmative Action program for minority Republicans so they can feel relevant. Let the Republicans propose a few bills and pass some bills out of committee. If Assembly Republicans get too uppity or radical, the Democrat majority can vote them down in the main chamber. You know Governor Arnold will support it. Maybe over time Republicans will learn to be somewhat more bipartisan. Just think, if they learn how to be a little less ideological maybe the bipartisanship can work both ways and we can have a better state government.

Then Ward Connerly can have a ballot initiative to repeal it, and just maybe the Raiders will have a winning season!

California voters rejected the Peripheral Canal (Proposition 9) when it was on the ballot in 1982. “96% of Contra Costa County voters opposed this because it would harm our water quality and damage the ecosystem,” explained Arne Simonsen, Delta Protection Commissioner. “Our local economy depends on water from the Delta. Giving it to LA would destroy agriculture,” added Mayor Bruce Connelley of Oakley.

Those wishing to view Ms. Buchanan’s statements of support and denial may visit http://www.youtube.com/doubletalkbuchanan

Mayor Wilson’s press conference may be viewed at http://www.youtube.com/user/JoinTeamWilson

“If you who produce our local daily paper actually had any principles, you would be pounding this story, because the prosperity of all Americans was put at risk by the foolish, short-sighted, politically selfish, and possibly corrupt actions of leading Democrats, including Obama.”

Would the Last Honest Reporter Please Turn On
the Lights?
By Orson Scott Card”

An open letter to the local daily paper — almost every local daily paper in America: I remember reading All the President’s Men and thinking: That’s journalism. You do what it takes to get the truth and you lay it before the public, because the public has a right to know. Here’s an Excerpt:

This housing crisis didn’t come out of nowhere. It was not a vague emanation of the evil Bush administration. It was a direct result of the political decision, back in the late 1990s, to loosen the rules of lending so that home loans would be more accessible to poor people. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were authorized to approve risky loans.

What is a risky loan? It’s a loan that the recipient is likely not to be able to repay.

The goal of this rule change was to help the poor — which especially would help members of minority groups. But how does it help these people to give them a loan that they can’t repay? They get into a house, yes, but when they can’t make the payments, they lose the house — along with their credit rating.

They end up worse off than before.

This was completely foreseeable and in fact many people did foresee it. One political party, in Congress and in the executive branch, tried repeatedly to tighten up the rules. The other party blocked every such attempt and tried to loosen them.

Furthermore, Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae were making political contributions to the very members of Congress who were allowing them to make irresponsible loans. (Though why quasi-federal agencies were allowed to do so baffles me. It’s as if the Pentagon were allowed to contribute to the political campaigns of Congressmen who support increasing their budget.)

Isn’t there a story here? Doesn’t journalism require that you who produce our daily paper tell the truth about who brought us to a position where the only way to keep confidence in our economy was a $700 billion bailout? Aren’t you supposed to follow the money and see which politicians were benefiting personally from the deregulation of mortgage lending?

I have no doubt that if these facts had pointed to the Republican Party or to John McCain as the guilty parties, you would be treating it as a vast scandal. “Housing-gate,” no doubt. Or “Fannie-gate.”

Instead, it was Senator Christopher Dodd and Congressman Barney Frank, both Democrats, who denied that there were any problems, who refused Bush administration requests to set up a regulatory agency to watch over Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and who were still pushing for these agencies to go even further in promoting sub-prime mortgage loans almost up to the minute they failed.

As Thomas Sowell points out in a TownHall.com essay entitled “Do Facts Matter?” ( http://snipurl.com/457townhall_com] ): “Alan Greenspan warned them four years ago. So did the Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers to the President. So did Bush’s Secretary of the Treasury.”

These are facts. This financial crisis was completely preventable. The party that blocked any attempt to prevent it was … the Democratic Party. The party that tried to prevent it was … the Republican Party.

Yet when Nancy Pelosi accused the Bush administration and Republican deregulation of causing the crisis, you in the press did not hold her to account for her lie. Instead, you criticized Republicans who took offense at this lie and refused to vote for the bailout!

What? It’s not the liar, but the victims of the lie who are to blame?

Now let’s follow the money … right to the presidential candidate who is the number-two recipient of campaign contributions from Fannie Mae.

And after Freddie Raines, the CEO of Fannie Mae who made $90 million while running it into the ground, was fired for his incompetence, one presidential candidate’s campaign actually consulted him for advice on housing.

If that presidential candidate had been John McCain, you would have called it a major scandal and we would be getting stories in your paper every day about how incompetent and corrupt he was.

But instead, that candidate was Barack Obama, and so you have buried this story, and when the McCain campaign dared to call Raines an “adviser” to the Obama campaign — because that campaign had sought his advice — you actually let Obama’s people get away with accusing McCain of lying, merely because Raines wasn’t listed as an official adviser to the Obama campaign.

You would never tolerate such weasely nit-picking from a Republican.

If you who produce our local daily paper actually had any principles, you would be pounding this story, because the prosperity of all Americans was put at risk by the foolish, short-sighted, politically selfish, and possibly corrupt actions of leading Democrats, including Obama.

If you who produce our local daily paper had any personal honor, you would find it unbearable to let the American people believe that somehow Republicans were to blame for this crisis.

There are precedents. Even though President Bush and his administration never said that Iraq sponsored or was linked to 9/11, you could not stand the fact that Americans had that misapprehension — so you pounded us with the fact that there was no such link. (Along the way, you created the false impression that Bush had lied to them and said that there was a connection.)

If you had any principles, then surely right now, when the American people are set to blame President Bush and John McCain for a crisis they tried to prevent, and are actually shifting to approve of Barack Obama because of a crisis he helped cause, you would be laboring at least as hard to correct that false impression.

Your job, as journalists, is to tell the truth. That’s what you claim you do, when you accept people’s money to buy or subscribe to your paper.

But right now, you are consenting to or actively promoting a big fat lie — that the housing crisis should somehow be blamed on Bush, McCain, and the Republicans. You have trained the American people to blame everything bad — even bad weather — on Bush, and they are responding as you have taught them to.

If you had any personal honor, each reporter and editor would be insisting on telling the truth — even if it hurts the election chances of your favorite candidate.

Because that’s what honorable people do. Honest people tell the truth even when they don’t like the probable consequences. That’s what honesty means . That’s how trust is earned.

Barack Obama is just another politician, and not a very wise one. He has revealed his ignorance and naivete time after time — and you have swept it under the rug, treated it as nothing.

Meanwhile, you have participated in the borking of Sarah Palin, reporting savage attacks on her for the pregnancy of her unmarried daughter — while you ignored the story of John Edwards’s own adultery for many months.

So I ask you now: Do you have any standards at all? Do you even know what honesty means?

Is getting people to vote for Barack Obama so important that you will throw away everything that journalism is supposed to stand for?

You might want to remember the way the National Organization of Women threw away their integrity by supporting Bill Clinton despite his well-known pattern of sexual exploitation of powerless women. Who listens to NOW anymore? We know they stand for nothing; they have no principles.

That’s where you are right now.

It’s not too late. You know that if the situation were reversed, and the truth would damage McCain and help Obama, you would be moving heaven and earth to get the true story out there.

If you want to redeem your honor, you will swallow hard and make a list of all the stories you would print if it were McCain who had been getting money from Fannie Mae, McCain whose campaign had consulted with its discredited former CEO, McCain who had voted against tightening its lending practices.

Then you will print them, even though every one of those true stories will point the finger of blame at the reckless Democratic Party, which put our nation’s prosperity at risk so they could feel good about helping the poor, and lay a fair share of the blame at Obama’s door.

You will also tell the truth about John McCain: that he tried, as a Senator, to do what it took to prevent this crisis. You will tell the truth about President Bush: that his administration tried more than once to get Congress to regulate lending in a responsible way.

This was a Congress-caused crisis, beginning during the Clinton administration, with Democrats leading the way into the crisis and blocking every effort to get out of it in a timely fashion.

If you at our local daily newspaper continue to let Americans believe — and vote as if — President Bush and the Republicans caused the crisis, then you are joining in that lie.

If you do not tell the truth about the Democrats — including Barack Obama — and do so with the same energy you would use if the miscreants were Republicans — then you are not journalists by any standard.

You’re just the public relations machine of the Democratic Party, and it’s time you were all fired and real journalists brought in, so that we can actually have a news paper in our city.

This article first appeared in The Rhinoceros Times of Greensboro, North Carolina.

I remember that fateful night in 1994 when we Republicans shocked the world and took back congress from the Democrats. The Democrats in Congress had lost touch with the electorate and had become complacent. By 2002 the Republicans had both houses of congress the presidency and the Supreme Court. There was talk arrogantly of the permanent GOP ruling majority by honchos of George W. Bush. Yet unknown to my fellow Republicans, even then, we had reached the climax of our power as a political party.

From that point forward it has been a gradual downhill dissent led by a series of bad decisions into the abyss we are facing today. Historians will write about the stupid decision to go to war in Iraq when they did not have the troops or the commitment by the political class to put the country on a war footing, the response to hurricane Katrina, the massive expansion of the federal government at every level, hideous pork barrel spending (earmarks) by congress, the fierce cronyism of the Bush Administration. Lets not forget the utter disaster that is our border with Mexico. Republican Congressman making sexual overtures to house pages, etc, etc. By 2006 the American people had had enough and it was time to send the Republican Congress packing.

Now the American people have to choose whether to keep the Republicans running the executive branch of government or elect an untested and unknown Democrat Barack Obama to the Whitehouse? In a world of deep uncertainty either choice is a hard one. The current Republican ticket is the strangest combination in the history of the GOP. Remember Nixon-Lodge, Ford-Dole, Reagan-Bush or Bush-Cheney, Dole-Kemp? Now we have McCain-Palin.

It is bizarre to watch John McCain, the son of Admirals, a DC insider, campaign as a populist! McCain, the new populist, after all, hangs out with Warren Beatty and cannot tell you how many homes he owns. What kind of Populist does not know how many homes he owns? Or even an approximate number. His running mate Sarah Palin is a populist in the same manner as Pat Buchanan. While she brings home the red meat base of the GOP, she is extremely unqualified to be President of the United States at this point and should something happen to the 72 year old McCain… my God, President Sarah Palin!

Their campaign against elites in DC is interesting but reeks more of desperation than any kind of strategy. Even the miserable Dole-Kemp campaign was better than McCain-Palin. And McCain’s age and health history are a factor. McCain’s constant mistakes like his statement that Iraq borders Pakistan makes me question whether this 72 year old man is up for the mental stamina of the job of being President. Remember Ronald Reagan’s 2nd term was married by Iran Contra and a seeming lack of attention to details by the 72-76 year old president. Yes Reagan rallied at the end of his term to finish on top. But the whole deal with Oliver North and Admiral Poindexter marred his successful presidency.

As Republicans and more importantly as Americans we have to ask ourselves does the GOP deserve another term in office at this time. Our elected Republicans have driven the party to its is lowest ebb since 1974 and it is entirely our fault. The slaughter that is coming in November will make election night a very difficult one. We have lost track of is the fact that we ultimately work for the American people. Currently the American people do not think that government run by a Republican Party that is only interested in reelection and pork barrel spending is worth reelecting. That kind of party does not deserve to control the levers of power. Yes the Democrats are bad. But at least they are not hypocrites.

I know what to expect from them and they deliver it all the time. I expect better from the GOP. The party faithful have been sold down the river by the corrupt politicians in Washington. No I am not going to endorse Barack Obama. But maybe it is time to turn the country over to a different type of coalition until we Republicans can get our act together.

What I really want to see is a wholesale purging of anyone connected with the last eight years of corrupt Washington Republican politics. Let them all be flushed out to sea. Then while we are in the wilderness we can weed out our ranks. Then like the guerilla fighters we once were we can make the long march and come down from the mountains, lean rested and ready, to retake the Imperial City for the American people.

“Put it all together, and it’s a big, fat political mess. The contending ideological factions have been rolling toward this calamity for years, adopting budget after budget that evaded underlying conflicts of spending and revenues with gimmicks and wishful thinking, well aware that any economic downturn could put them into a hole too deep to ignore.

“It’s finally happened. No one – and that includes the governor and 120 legislators – has the slightest notion of how or when the mess will be cleaned up, or whether it will be.”