Carolina Politics Online

Or… a bunch of Obamanicas got together to bitch about this tyrannical health care bill they’re trying to shove up our asses. Same difference.

President Barack Obama’s name and the message of “change” were the rallying call at a forum for Democratic would-be opponents against Republican Sen. Richard Burr Monday night.
That partly was because the forum was hosted by Durham for Obama, an organization counting 11,000 members that helped mobilize Bull City voters in 2008.

Another reason was that the message of “change” was still an effective invocation, generating enthusiastic applause from the 300 supporters, voters and volunteers who packed into the St. Joseph’s AME Church Monday night.

“America voted for change in 2008, and we have not seen it,” said Elaine Marshall, N.C. Secretary of State.

“We need to send a senator with the courage, intent and strength to bring change to the U.S. Senate,” said Ken Lewis, a Raleigh attorney.

The economy and health care were the hot topics Monday night. Some of the changes that the candidates proposed included creating more jobs through tax breaks for small businesses and investments in green technology, and including a public option in health care reform.

The Herald Sun

The crap going on in Washington, D.C. right now has sapped any patience I would have had for this story. At this point, I’m just going to deem that any person who even remotely supports this health-care abomination is a traitor and a wannabe despot. So there.

Appearing before Graham on ABC’s “This Week,” Axelrod had brushed off Sen. Scott Brown’s (R-Mass.) criticism of healthcare reform, saying that Brown had voted for a very similar package for his home state of Massachusetts.

“Senator Brown comes from a state that has a healthcare plan that’s similar to the one we’re trying to enact here,” Axelrod said. “We’re just trying to give the rest of America the same opportunities that the people of Massachusetts have.”

That argument rubbed Graham the wrong way.

“The American people are getting tired of this crap,” Graham said of Axelrod’s comments. “No way in the world is what they did in Massachusetts like what we’re about to do in Washington.”

The Hill

While it is true that America has grown tired of the lies and deception of the Obama administration, it is ironic that Senator Graham is tuned into that frequency, yet he cannot see that many of us here in South Carolina are as equally tired of Senator Graham’s crap.

Richard Burr’s campaign headquarters here in the basement of a bank building may look unassuming, but it neatly illustratesthe problem for his Republican primary challengers.

Burr has space set aside for volunteers, fundraisers and strategists, all of whom are working for a candidate who has already successfully run one statewide campaign and six bids for the U.S. House before that. The campaign expects to raise $15 million by the end of the year.

Designed to fight off the Democrats’ eventual nominee, Burr’s operation is beyond anything GOP challengers Eddie Burks or Brad Jones say they have at their disposal.

“I can’t imagine it,” Burks said of Burr’s fundraising goal. “There’s just no way that I can get the kind of money he has … Everybody who’s sent me anything, I’ve known who they are.”

The News-Record

It’s a shame that running for office has become so difficult for the average American. I think one of the reasons our country is in such a mess is because most of the successful politicians don’t have to be policy experts as long as they’re fundraising experts.

“I can’t imagine it,” Burks said of Burr’s fundraising goal. “There’s just no way that I can get the kind of money he has … Everybody who’s sent me anything, I’ve known who they are.”

Burks’ campaign staff consists of a manager and a treasurer, but he has no plans to hire a fundraising consultant.

That said, Burks has already produced three television spots and hopes to have enough money to put them on in specific spots throughout the state.

Jones said he will use some radio commercials and rely on friends throughout the state to spread the word about his campaign.

“It’s just going to be a grass-roots thing,” he said.

Neither Burks nor Jones think that Burr has been conservative enough or responsive to North Carolina’s needs.

“During the years of the Bush administration, he was a rubber stamp for every spending program,” Jones said. “They tried to outspend the Democrats and he went right along with it. And now that the executive branch is no longer held by a Republican, he’s acting conservative again.”

Jones said if he were elected he would call for an audit of all federal systems “down to the broom closets” and push Congress to adopt a balanced budget. The federal government also needs to make good on promises to those who have been forced to pay into Medicare and Social Security, he said.

When asked why he was running against Burr, Burks said it wasn’t an easy decision for someone who has served one term as a small-town mayor and is in the third year of his first term on the Asheboro City Council.

“It came to me in church one evening,” said Burks, who describes himself as a born-again Christian. Feedback from other businessmen and local government officials helped push him fully into the race.

“I found a surprising number of people who are involved in politics … who knew nothing about Senator Burr,” Burks said.

He said other city officials described Burr as “inaccessible.”

That will be a cold day in Hell.  This man is becoming more incredible by the day.

I can say with the utmost certainty right now that I will not be fingerprinted by the Federal government and treated like a common criminal just so I can have a job and if Lindsey Graham thinks that the people of this state are going to stand for this he is sorely mistaken.

Lawmakers working to craft a new comprehensive immigration bill have settled on a way to prevent employers from hiring illegal immigrants: a national biometric identification card all American workers would eventually be required to obtain.

Under the potentially controversial plan still taking shape in the Senate, all legal U.S. workers, including citizens and immigrants, would be issued an ID card with embedded information, such as fingerprints, to tie the card to the worker.

The ID card plan is one of several steps advocates of an immigration overhaul are taking to address concerns that have defeated similar bills in the past.

The uphill effort to pass a bill is being led by Sens. Chuck Schumer (D., N.Y.) and Lindsey Graham (R., S.C.), who plan to meet with President Barack Obama as soon as this week to update him on their work. An administration official said the White House had no position on the biometric card.

“It’s the nub of solving the immigration dilemma politically speaking,” Mr. Schumer said in an interview. The card, he said, would directly answer concerns that after legislation is signed, another wave of illegal immigrants would arrive. “If you say they can’t get a job when they come here, you’ll stop it.”

The biggest objections to the biometric cards may come from privacy advocates, who fear they would become de facto national ID cards that enable the government to track citizens.

“It is fundamentally a massive invasion of people’s privacy,” said Chris Calabrese, legislative counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union. “We’re not only talking about fingerprinting every American, treating ordinary Americans like criminals in order to work. We’re also talking about a card that would quickly spread from work to voting to travel to pretty much every aspect of American life that requires identification.”

The Wall Street Journal

Damn right it will. That’s the same thing that happened with Social Security. Your Social Security number was only supposed to be used within the parameters of that program and it ended up turning into a national identifier for just about every aspect of our lives, credit, employment, loans, etc. This proposal is a back door to the National ID that people have been pushing back against.

We don’t need an Orwellian government tracking program to stop illegal immigration. We just need to enforce the existing laws on the books.

Lindsey Graham needs to be stopped.  He is morphing into an oppressive fascist who no longer has any respect for our Constitution nor the freedom of the American people.

Victor Rawl, a Democratic member of the Charleston County Council and a former circuit court judge, announced his Senate candidacy Monday at events in North Charleston, Columbia, Greenville and Spartanburg.

Rawl, 64, served briefly in the state legislature and retired as a lieutenant colonel in the South Carolina National Guard.

In running against the first-term DeMint, Rawl gives Democrats at least the prospect of a competitive race. Chad McGowan, an attorney who had raised about $250,000, dropped his campaign against the incumbent last month.

Read more: Politico

Are you kidding me?

Few kill. But many rant.

The litany that made accused Pentagon attacker Joseph Patrick Bedell smolder and rant is varied, and still coming to light. His history was one of mental illness, not fringe-group agitation.

In an Internet posting, Bedell had suggested an act like the 2001 terrorist attacks could have been the work of a criminal organization controlling the U.S. government, accepting a “sacrifice of thousands of its citizens … as a small cost in order to perpetuate its barbaric control.”

His poisonous view of the government appears well out on the extreme—until you see what some people close to the center of power are saying these days.

“America is teetering towards tyranny,” Republican Sen. Jim DeMint of South Carolina told the Conservative Political Action Conference last month. He accused the governing Democrats of peddling socialist policies “that have been the enemy of freedom for centuries all over the world.”

Republicans have been branding Democratic policies as some form of socialism for generations, par for the course.

But tyranny? America has real issues with that—it violently overthrew that enemy at the start.

The AP

My God, I don’t even know where to begin on this.  First of all, the Democrats’ policies are a form of Socialism.  That is simply not up for debate particularly since we have a president in the White House who has succeeded in partially socializing the auto industry, the banking industry, and is attempting to take complete control of the health care industry.

Secondly, let’s discuss tyranny.  We have a president and a Congress trying to ram a government take over of health care down the throats of the entire nation that the people have soundly rejected and yet the Congress doesn’t give a damn.  That’s the latest tyrannical actions of the Federal government in a list of hundreds, if not thousands more going back decades.  Redistribution of wealth, compulsory education, radical environmentalism, all of these things and more are actions of a tyrannical government.  The Founders of this country revolted against the British for a hell of a lot less than what we put up with today, but let’s get down to the meat and potatoes of this absurd juxtoposition.

Senator DeMint said, “America is teetering towards tyranny.”  That’s it.  And according to the dynamic douche bag duo Calvin Woodward and Eileen Sullivan of the Associated Press, those words drove Joseph Bedell to open fire at the Pentagon subway station.  They glossed right over an inconvenient truth for them, however, that Bedell was a registered Democrat.  Bedell also despised George W Bush and was a 9-11 truther.  He was also diagnosed bi-polar and manic depressive.  Does this sound like a loony right wing militia wanna be clinging to God and his guns to you?  This fits the bill of an anarchist and they don’t like government regardless of who is controlling it.  He was also clinically nuts.

You would think that two experienced “journalists” would have been able to find these facts that dozens of other folks in the alternative media were able to track down in a matter of hours following the incident,  but it’s clear that Woodward and Sullivan were more concerned with pushing a biased political agenda than being honest couriers of  the news.

He’s at it again.

Reporting from Washington – Despite steep odds, the White House has discussed prospects for reviving a major overhaul of the nation’s immigration laws, a commitment that President Obama has postponed once already.

Obama took up the issue privately with his staff Monday in a bid to advance a bill through Congress before lawmakers become too distracted by approaching midterm elections.

In the session, Obama and members of his Domestic Policy Council outlined ways to resuscitate the effort in a White House meeting with two senators — Democrat Charles E. Schumer of New York and Republican Lindsey Graham of South Carolina — who have spent months trying to craft a bill.

According to a person familiar with the meeting, the White House may ask Schumer and Graham to at least produce a blueprint that could be turned into legislative language.

The basis of a bill would include a path toward citizenship for the 10.8 million people living in the U.S. illegally. Citizenship would not be granted lightly, the White House said. Undocumented workers would need to register, pay taxes and pay a penalty for violating the law. Failure to comply might result in deportation.

Los Angeles Times

This sounds like the same stupid idea Bush trotted out a few years back.  Who is going to register and pay all of these penalties when they can just stay here under the radar and milk the system?  Notice that there is no definitive punishment for not complying.  It says who do not may get deported, not will.

With 16.8% unemployment nation wide and South Carolina’s unemployment rate over 12%, why in the hell is Lindsey Graham trying to legalize another 10 million people and bring them into the mainstream work force?  American citizens can’t even find a job right now.

Additionally, with all the problems the Obama administration has had with health care, Cap and Trade, spending, and everything else they’ve tried to do, why would Obama even want to go anywhere near this political hot potato?  Does he not remember the backlash that occurred around this country when Bush brought up his amnesty bill?  People are already seriously pissed off at this administration and the overall government in general.  The Democrats are already plenty damaged over the health care bill.  Can you imagine what is going to happen once they start pushing forward with amnesty again?  Sometimes I am convinced this man wants his party to get obliterated in November.  Is he really this obtuse?

Using the Antiquities Act, President Carter locked up more land than any other president had before him, taking more than 50 million acres in Alaska despite strong opposition from the state.

President Clinton used the authority 22 times to prohibit hunting, recreational vehicles, mining, forestry and even grazing in 5.9 million acres scattered around the country. The law allowed him to single-handedly create 19 new national monuments and expand three others without consulting anyone.

One of the monuments President Clinton created was the Grande Staircase-Escalante in Utah, where 135,000 acres of land were leased for oil and gas and about 65,000 barrels of oil were produced each year from five active wells. But, President Clinton put an end to developing those resources.

President Obama could do the same in other energy-rich places unless Congress takes action. At least 13.5 million acres are already on his Department of Interior’s real estate shopping list.

This includes a 58,000-acre area in New Mexico. The memo said this should be done so the lesser prairie chicken and the sand dune lizard will be better protected. Are these animals going extinct? No. The bureaucrats wrote that the land should be locked up to “avoid the necessity of listing either of these species as threatened or endangered.”

In Nevada, the Obama administration might make another monument in the Heart of the Great Basin because it, supposedly, is a “center of climate change scientific research.”

In Colorado, the government is considering designating the Vermillion Basin as a monument because it is “currently under the threat of oil and gas development.”

Americans should be wary of any plans a president has to seize land from the states without their consent. Any new plans to take away states’ freedom to use land as they see fit must be stopped.

That’s why I sponsored an amendment to block Mr. Obama from declaring any of the 14 lands listed in the memo as “monuments.” Unfortunately, the Senate, led by Democrats, rejected it on Thursday evening by a vote of 58-38.

Read more at The Washington Times

The Antiquities Act of 1906 was signed into law by President Theodore Roosevelt (R) initially to stop the raping of American Indian artifacts in the southwest.  It gave the President the power by executive order to declare any government owned public land as restricted.  The problem is that it’s since been used over 100 times since its conception and one person should not be allowed to have that kind of authority.  The Office of President was purposely made weak by the Founders for a reason.

I can see instances in which the Federal government may need to restrict public land use at times, but that should be done by a vote of the full Congress so that there is input from the American people.  The proposals shouldn’t be sealed away in a secret document and then carried forth through executive order by one man.  That’s simply not the way America was designed to work.

But Senator Joseph Lieberman, an independent working with Graham and Kerry, said a detailed outline of a bill could come within days and that it will have to include a ceiling on greenhouse gas emissions that drops in future years.

Last June, the House narrowly passed a climate change bill with cap-and-trade as its centerpiece and a carbon-reduction target of 17 percent by 2020, from 2005 levels.

But the initiative has stalled in the Senate, despite Senate Environment and Public Works Committee approval of a similar bill.

But, as a result of work in the past few months, Kerry said he was feeling “more confident” that a climate change bill could be presented to the Senate for passage this year.

“We’re looking at a new way of coming at this that we think can attract greater support,” Kerry said.

Environmentalists have speculated the bill the senators will produce could take a “sectoral approach” by imposing a new carbon-pricing mechanism on utilities, which account for about 40 percent of the emissions blamed for global warming.

Sources also have said there is talk of a transportation tax. Pollution controls on manufacturers could be put off for a few years to give time for more affordable alternative energy sources to come on line, they have said.

Reuters

I would really like to wonder exactly when it was that someone beat Lindsey Graham with the stupid stick because that guy has nothing but shit for brains.  A transportation tax?  It’s not clear as to what exactly that would entail, but one thing is for certain.  The result will not be good for South Carolina.  Any tax on transportation, but whether its an increase in the gas tax, a tax on transportation companies, on the airlines, etc is going to smack everyone in this state in their back pocket.  A tax on truckers transporting goods would be absolutely criminal because it would cause prices to rise in just about every sector, socking the poor and the middle class harder than anyone.

And yet Graham can’t figure out why he keeps getting booed when he speaks around his own state, oblivious to the fact he is alienating his own constituents in the name of junk science.

The so-called “jobs” bill passed the Senate by a vote of 70 – 28 and will result in throwing away another $15 billion in money we don’t have and in the end will do absolutely nothing to help our ailing economy.  It is estimated by some that the bill will create 250,000 jobs, a smidgen of the 8 million that have been lost, but what happens when the money runs out?  Well, so do the jobs and that’s the main problem.  These are temporary jobs that are nothing more than band-aids.  In the long run our economy will still be in the crapper.

Part of the incentive that will allegedly create these jobs is an exemption from the payroll tax for businesses that hire new workers and an extra $1,000 credit if they employ them for at least a year.  So let’s think about that.  If I hire a new employee for, say, $40,000 a year, I don’t have to pay the 6.5% payroll tax on their salary and I get a $1,000 credit from the Feds a year from now.  Perhaps my math is fuzzy, but I’m still out $39,000.  In a down economy the demand for my services isn’t picking up, so what good will it do me to bring on this extra employee?  Legislation like this is living proof that anybody off the street can run for office.

Your two North Carolina Senators, Richard Burr (R) and Kay Hagan (D), supported wasting your hard earned money and adding more to our already chronic national debt.

Winthrop University here in Rock Hill released the results of their latest political polling for the state.  The conclusion?  Most people really don’t much about the people running for governor on either side of the aisle.  I guess that’s not overly surprising.  Most people really don’t start paying attention until the last couple weeks before an election.  Over 75% of people polled knew very little about any of the Democrats running.  When it came to favorable ratings among all candidates of both parties, Lt Gov. Andre Bauer squeaked out through the top of the pack.

Regarding other questions that were asked, people in the state like Michelle Obama better than her husband.  Jenny Sanford is held in fairly high regard and Republicans are far more fond of Senator Jim DeMint than they are of Senator Lindsey Graham.

U.S. Senate- Republican Primary
Richard Burr (i)- 55%
Brad Jones- 10%
Eddie Burks- 3%
Undecided- 31%
(moe-3.9%; PPP, 646 Republican voters, Feb. 12 to 15)

U.S. Senate- Democrat Primary
Elaine Marshall- 29%
Cal Cunningham- 12%
Ken Lewis- 5%
Marcus Williams- 2%
Undecided- 51%
(moe-4.9%; PPP, 400 Democrats, Feb. 12-15)

Elaine Marshall- 14%
Cal Cunningham- 4%
Ken Lewis- 5%
Undecided- 77%
(moe-5%; Civitas, 367 Democrats, Feb. 15-18)

h/t- The N&O

The organizers at Freedom Works, like most of us in South Carolina, are rightly peeved with Senator Grahamnesty over his support of Cap and Trade which would not be in the best interest of our state and which he is supposed to be representing first and foremost.  This rolls right along with what I wrote about just a few days ago.  They are organizing a protest this Saturday in Greenville.

South Carolinians are tired of Senator Lindsey Graham’s support for “cap and trade.” For some reason Sen. Graham thinks that imposing a massive tax increase on our energy supply is a good idea. He has been partnering with left-wing senators to come up with a plan that would be devastating to our economy and would increase the cost of energy for all consumers. If you are like us, you have had enough of Sen. Graham’s position on cap and trade.

Please join us as we gather together this Saturday, Feb. 27th to send a message to him that we dissapprove of his stance on this important issue. We will be gathering to write letters to Sen. Graham, and then we will hand deliver them to his district office in Greenville. After that, we will protest his support of cap and trade outside his office.

Here are the details of the events:

9:00am FreedomWorks breakfast and letter-writing at Soby’s restaurant
22 East Court St, Greenville, SC 29601
Map

10:30am Protest outside Sen. Graham’s downtown office
130 South Main St., 7th Floor, Greenville, SC 29601
Map

To rsvp for this event, please contact FreedomWorks regional director Allen Page at a.page@mindspring.com or 336-213-1167. You can also click here to rsvp online. We hope you can join us this weekend on the first anniversary of the tea party protests!

Sen. Richard Burr made his re-election campaign official on Monday when he filed for re-election.

But he’s not going to have the Republican primary all to himself. Over the last year, many conservatives have shown displeasure (to put it mildly) with Burr’s support of some budget-busting spending bills.  He voted for the first bailout in the last months of George W. Bush’s administration, for instance. Sure, Burr looks like a piker now that Obama’s in office, but it’s too little too late for some conservatives.

Brad Jones, a 65, who runs an electronics businessman, said he is running to provide a more conservative alternative to Burr, Rob Christensen reports. Jones said the Burr “rubber stamped” all of the spending policies of President George W. Bush and voted for the bank bailout.

“I want to give people an alternative,” Jones said. “I’m more of a Jesse Helms conservative. Now that there is a Democrat in the White House, he (Burr) is acting more conservative.”

Eddie Burks, a 48-year-old Asheboro City Councilman, calls Burr “unresponsive and inaccessible.”

“Have you seen any leadership from Sen. Burr?” Burks asked in an interview. “I haven’t. Most people can’t tell me anything they like about the senator.”

The N&O

Will we ever be rid of this guy?

For those concerned about warming, it’s time for a shift in emphasis. Fortunately, one has already been provided to them by Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), who has done more than any Democrat to keep climate legislation alive this year. His solution: skip the hurricanes and Himalayan glaciers and keep the argument on the hundreds of billions of dollars spent annually on foreign oil, some of that going to terrorists rather than to domestic job creation.

The Washington Post

There are people that claim they are sick and tired of the bipartisanship in D.C.  I personally see nothing necessarily wrong with partisanship in government because I tend to view reaching across the aisle as a selling out of your beliefs most of the time and what your constituents elected you for.  Graham has tried to play Mr. Uniter throughout his Senate career, but unfortunately keeps choosing the most inopportune times to do so.  First there was the big blow back on his support for McCain’s illegal immigration bill, the origin from whence came the nickname Grahamnesty.  Now he’s running around the country chapping his lips on the butt of Senator John Kerry (D-MA) over this climate change bill, much to the dismay of many South Carolinians.

Graham is correct that our heavy reliance on foreign oil is a serious issue, but we don’t need to cripple our economy through the Cap and Fraud bill to resolve that problem.  We just need to start drilling our own oil which we have plenty of.  We need to start building more nuclear power plants, which the Obama administration seems to be warming to.  Green energy investments in the private sector have been steadily growing as well.  We can do all of these things now without legislation.  None of them are illegal.

Instead of barking up the Cap and Fraud tree, Graham should simply be making a public push to pressure the administration to accept these other initiatives and move faster on them.  It’s highly unlikely that that the Waxman-Markey bill will ever become law at this point, but there has been talk of the Obama administration going around Congress and instead having the fascist EPA regulate green house gases.  This would essentially produce the same economic disastrous results on our nation by an unelected body, which in my opinion is unconstitutional.

A cap-and-trade system necessarily harms the economy because it is designed to raise the cost of energy. Given the current economic crisis, an expensive energy policy is a bad idea.

Almost all acts of economic production are powered by combusting fossil fuels (coal, oil, and natural gas), a process that emits greenhouse gases thought to cause global warming. A cap-and-trade system is simply a mechanism to put a price on emissions in order to compel businesses and consumers to emit less. That is, it’s essentially an emissions tax. But greenhouse gas emissions are virtually synonymous with energy use, so it’s actually a roundabout energy tax. In fact, economists agree that the simplest, most efficient way to reduce emissions is a direct tax. Politicians, however, are terrified of the “t-word,” which is why they have embraced a cap-and-trade system.

The numbers are staggering. President Barack Obama’s recently unveiled cap-and-trade plan would raise $645 billion in revenue from the government-run emissions auctions over eight years. Everyone would feel the pinch. Businesses would compensate for higher production costs and diminished markets by slashing jobs. Consumers would have to pay more for energy and energy intensive goods.

Expensive energy is bad enough, but the real danger of a cap-and-trade policy is a global trade war. A cap-and-trade system would give a competitive advantage to industries in countries that aren’t subject to a de facto energy tax. Jobs would flow overseas, but so would emissions, a dynamic known as “carbon leakage.” To prevent this, a broad coalition of industry, labor, and environmental groups have expressed interest in a tariff that would tax the emissions content of imports from countries without stringent climate policies. Naturally, these countries would retaliate if such a tariff were enacted. Protectionism deepened the Great Depression, just as climate protectionism would worsen the current recession.

William Yeatman – Council on Foreign Relations

Join us for a hometown campaign jump start for

Cal Cunningham
Candidate for U.S. Senate

Barbecue Dinner

Tuesday, March 16, 2010

6:30 p.m. – 8:30 p.m.

Richard Childress Racing Auditorium
425 Industrial Drive
Welcome, NC

Individual Tickets
$25

TO RSVP, please visit www.calfornc.com/events/jumpstart.

To sponsor the event or for more information, please contact Crystal Perkins, 336-248-2010 or crystal@calfornc.com.

Erick Erickson from the conservative organization RedState wrote a piece this morning explaining why it’s futile for grassroots conservatives within the Republican Party to depend on conservative party “leaders” to make the first move in getting behind a quality candidate.  He cites Nikki Haley’s candidacy as an example.

In Pennsylvania, again Jim DeMint showed real leadership. He came out for Pat Toomey when everybody else went with Specter. Now it looks like Toomey has a serious shot at winning. Conservatives took real risks in going with Toomey. But with that great risk is coming a great reward.

That’s not happening so much any more.

In South Carolina, Nikki Haley struggles to get momentum. Republicans like Sarah Palin and others could come in and endorse her. But then if she loses these potential 2012 Presidential candidates might have to face a South Carolina Governor who they didn’t endorse. But Haley is the one who is most right on the most issues. She is the dream candidate with the compelling narrative.

RedState

I don’t know that I’d consider Sarah Palin to be a grassroots conservative leader considering that she required a $100,000 fee to be a speaker at the recent national tea party event in Nashville, but conservatives around the country seem to have an infatuation with her.  Her example aside, I do agree with Erickson when it comes to Nikki Haley.  Of all candidates on both sides of the aisle Haley is the one I am most confident in when it comes to bringing this state forward and achieving positive results.  The fact that RedState has endorsed her candidacy tells me that she should be the ideal candidate for most conservatives as well, yet leaders of the conservative movement are MIA when it comes to getting out in public and pushing her candidacy to Republican primary voters.  Is Erickson correct in his assessment that Republican presidential wannabees are reluctant to weigh in on the gubernatorial race due to a fear of not backing the eventual winning candidate and losing support of the future governor of the first in the south primary come 2012?  After all, historically the Republican candidate that has won the South Carolina presidential primary has gone on to win the party nomination at the convention.

A true principled leader would certainly not let politics sway their voice.  As Erickson pointed out, political convenience did not stop Senator DeMint from publicly stating that he would not back the reelection of an incumbent seeking reelection in his own party.  That, my friends, is true leadership, so where are the movement “leaders” for Haley?

The Conservative Political Action Conference, CPAC, began this morning and continues through Saturday.  Senator Jim DeMint spoke there earlier today.  Here is his speech.

From McGowan’s website:

“I’ve come to the conclusion that now is the wrong time for me to mount a successful campaign for the United States Senate. The demands of a young family place a premium on every minute. There is nothing more important to me than my wife and three small children. In order to fulfill my duties as a husband and a father, I’ll be leaving the race for United States Senate effective immediately. A few years from now, the kids will be older and in a phase of life that can tolerate the demands of a successful run. In the meantime, I’d like to thank my supporters for standing tall with me thus far, but ask that they understand that my kids comes first and they need me at home. I am still very much committed to the cause of fixing our broken political system, and will be fighting from the sidelines to defeat Jim DeMint and others who think South Carolina’s best days are behind us.”

Jim DeMint thinks S.C.’s best days are behind ya, huh? Yeah… you made the right call by dropping out. The Mighty Jim DeMint is gonna wipe the floor with anyone the Dems put up against him this year.

(h/t: The Campaign Spot)

Senator Jim DeMint Twittered that across the World Wide Web this afternoon.  I was in Florida the past few days for work and as I was at the airport in Fort Myers this morning catching my flight home all of the flights to Washington D.C had been canceled due to the second brutal snow storm to hit them in a week.  D.C. already received about 30 inches a few days ago and they are expecting another 14 inches.  In fact, today’s Senate global warming (hehe) hearing has been canceled.

Man made climate change is the hoax of the century and most Americans now reject the belief that man is responsible for the weather patterns.  It’s conventional wisdom that you can only keep a secret for so long and so it’s no surprise that the scam is unraveling.  For the past five years we’ve seen record setting snow and colder temperatures across the country and around the world.  Folks in the north barely saw much of a summer this past year and even down here in the south we didn’t reach the usual number of sweltering dogs days we usually suffer through.  People only need to go outside to know that Al Gore is in serious need of a body cavity search compliments of Nurse Ratched.

It sure feels like the White Witch has taken hold of the throne and in the midst of her reign the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) has pretty much lost all its credibility.  What many of us have known for years is finally being revealed.  They’ve been lying.  It began in November with the hacked emails from East Anglia University in England in which climate “scientists” admitted on paper that they had cherry picked evidence that supported their beliefs and excluded that which did not.  Just two weeks ago it got even more embarrassing when the world discovered that U.N. “scientists” based their climate change claims on a student dissertation and an article in a mountaineering magazine.  Liars and shysters and frauds, oh my! Despite these “errors” in judgment the IPCC insists its work is sound.  The universe is laughing behind their backs.

Let it be known that for the believers in man made climate change, it is their religion and Al Gore is the pope.