flenser, I am not sure what you have against businessmen

I don’t have anything in particular “against businessmen”. Im tired and perplexed by the way in which people on the right place them on a pedesral, as if they are some sort of “heros of the capitalist revolution”. That’s not conservatism. And I’d like businessmen to be compelled to obey the law, just like the rest of us.

The problem isn’t the money in politics, its the lack of transparency.

There is no lack of transparency. See my link above. I repeat, if you don’t like the things politicians, do, follow the money. They are not acting out of conviction, except in rare cases.

The fact of the matter is Republicans get to Washington, and like anyone else, want to be liked.

They want to be given money so that they can run for re-election. Then they can buy being liked.

most of the blue chip companies CEOs are Democrat. Hence that isn’t the Republican problem.

Most CEO’s are not blue chip. And it’s a Republican problem because they are competing for the same pool of dollars.
A discussion of earmarks that omits why earmarks happen is pointless at best. I’m pointing why they happen, and you’re not showing I’m wrong.

“The two chief enemies of the free society or free enterprise are intellectuals on the one hand and businessmen on the other, for opposite reasons. Every intellectual believes in freedom for himself, but he’s opposed to freedom for others.…He thinks…there ought to be a central planning board that will establish social priorities.…The businessmen are just the opposite—every businessman is in favor of freedom for everybody else, but when it comes to himself that’s a different question. He’s always the special case. He ought to get special privileges from the government, a tariff, this, that, and the other thing…”

He always ought to get exempted from the laws which apply to everyone else.

Government can and should be competent despite what we have seen in the last eight years from both parties.

Government is competent at giving its backers what they want. The problem is not the bands competency at playing the tune, the problem is the people calling the tune.

I don’t agree with term limits, nor do I agree that the problem with the Republican Party is the business class. The problem with the Republican Party is it tried to out Democrat the Democrats

The reason they are doing that is because of the businessmen. In all the posts Morrisey does on earmarks, he never gets into WHY Congress likes them.

Take a look at a specific earmark.

Plum Creek Timber (PCL), with a market cap of $7 billion, began its corporate life in 1987 as Burlington Resources, spinning off of Burlington Northern to manage the railroad giant’s timber and mineral resources — some of which date back to the original railroad land grants of the Lincoln administration. In 1999, Plum Creek became a Real Estate Investment Trust, and began unloading its land holdings for high-end residential and recreational use. Today, with the real-estate and timber markets flat, Plum Creek has been looking to sell larger tracts of timberland to large institutional investors. The farm bill’s Qualified Forestry Bonds provision could provide up to $500 million to help sweeten such deals.

Plum Creek spent some $220,000 lobbying Congress in the first quarter of this year. Its PAC has spread $400,000 in campaign contributions between the parties in the last decade. PCL Employees have given $16,600 this cycle to Sen. Max Baucus (D., Mont.), chairman of the Senate Finance committee and the author of the bond provision. Baucus, whose staff did not answer inquiries, was enthusiastic enough about the forestry bonds that he put them into the Farm Bill (H.R. 2419), though they have nothing to do with agriculture. The bonds also didn’t have anything to do with energy when Baucus put them in last year’s energy bill.

We get earmarks because businessmen want them. We get these multiple attempts at amnesty because businessmen want them. We get affirmative action defended by businessmen because businessman want it. We get big government because businessmen want it. We get cultural and social liberalism because that is the way businessmen think.

Both parties cater almost exclusively to the business class. That is the problem, and earmarks are merely a symptom of it. Ban all earmarks today and by tomorrow Congress and the business class will have a found a new way to scratch each others backs.

…Republicans are different from Democrats.

In what way exactly?

Those concrete actions are:

* Terminate earmarks
* Seek term limits
* Start entitlement reform
* No more taxes
* Stop the spending
* Enforce these pledges

I expect Hades to freeze over first, but I’m an optimist.

“Ladies and Gentlemen, with every bit of ‘help’ you receive from the US Government strings are attached. Each dollar takes away another increment of your freedom and your privacy in ways that the Patriot Act at its worst could not achieve. We intend to remove the strings, remove the drain on your finances for the payments, often to the undeserving.
We intend to give you back your financial freedom.

“If you elect to help your fellow man during disasters we intend to give you tax breaks for doing so. We are not going to tax you so that your money can pay for people’s stupid decisions to build homes in the middle of flood plains, in areas seriously threatened by earthquakes, and areas below sea level behind fragile walls. But we will help YOU if you wish to help them.”

{^_^} And it needs a far better speech writer than I am. But I want my financial freedom back. I want a smaller government that is not into my pockets to pay people who feel they are owed it simply for being alive. I want to be free of paying other people to be poor.

Republicans can use the media to their advantage, if they but stop being afraid. Know you are going to be called names, and plan accordingly.

First, the GOP has to get serious about chucking people who are caught in corruption. And they have to get serious about keeping away from it, because otherwise the Democratic Party machinery and its many friends in government will use this as an opportunity to find or create scandal and further hurt the GOP. (And thanks to their MSM friends, the malfeasance won’t be evident to the general public.)

Second, instead of limiting terms the GOP should publicly and loudly press for changes to the congressional seniority rules: After a third in the House or a second in the Senate, you start your seniority count at zero again unless you stand down for at least one term.

Congress sets its own rules, and the party in control will never willingly change the rules that keep it that way, but if this could make it past the MSM it would go a long way towards getting people to pay attention to the problem.

The Term limits part I think is one of the few ideas that the founders must regularly kick themselves in the a*s about not putting in the constitution. Very simply when politics became jobs rather than civil service you did in your old age to give back for all you had received it was all over.
PROFESSIONAL POLITICIANS IS THE ROOT OF ALL OUR ILLS.

“arguing it is a chief responsibility of representatives to win federal aid for local initiatives.”

Scraping Jaw off floor. Ehhhh if they are Robin Hood who is the evil Sherrif the US tax base aka gen pop US?

Why not raise taxes if fiscal discipline warrants it? There is nothing wrong with raising more from some taxes while relaxing or abolishing other taxes. Fiscal discipline and prudent oversight of budgets and spending are more appropriate slogans for the coming years. Restricting economic policy to such a narrow specific covenant displays a real lack of imagination. Government can and should be competent despite what we have seen in the last eight years from both parties.

Simple.

Oh! And no dough from me until this stuff is a fact.

NO DOUGH.

* Terminate earmarks liars.
* Seek term limits the Lord.
* Start entitlement reform repenting.
* No more taxes prohibiting prayer.
* Stop the spending taking down Ten Commandments.
* Enforce these pledges rules.

For # 12 — Halt gerrymandering. This can make the center stronger.

NaCly dog on May 20, 2008 at 6:08 PM

Yes, and with term limits takes care of cleaning house.
But that is so complex, and more of a state issue.

Drilling for oil is the key.

Buy Danish on May 20, 2008 at 6:35 PM

Number one on my list, but not any good with out #2, building refineries quickly.

Anyway, even if congressional Republicans could change their stripes, good luck on getting the word out. They’ll be swimming upstrean against relentless MSM bias, and there’s a large uninformed population out there for whom the MSM is the sole source of news.

democrat stuff gets done when they were in the minority but republican stuff didn’t get done when they were in the majority

Our Republican stuff did not get done. The Chamber of Commerce got their stuff done lickity-split. The GOP expended great effort on things like CAFTA and a new bankruptcy law.

The reason the party does the things it does, and the reason it does not do the things it does not do, is because of the people it considers its real base. And they are not us.

If you want a change you need to outbid the businessmen for the partys attention. We could start a “Conservative PAC”, raise fifty mill or. That would get their attention.

They look at voters the way a boss looks at employees – people to be managed and led, if possible, and replaced if not.

If they destroy the economy due to what is essentially a myth built on lies and bad data, all those other little things you mention won’t really matter much.

The problem is that the members of both parties look out for their business buddies, and are indifferent or even hostile to the actual voters.

The GOP did not change in 2006 and they’re not changing now, because changing would make them unpopular with the type of people they socialize with. Better a lost election than to look conservative in front of their peers.

Reagans speech on a New Republican Party seems apt here.

And let me say so there can be no mistakes as to what I mean: The New Republican Party I envision will not be, and cannot, be one limited to the country club-big business image that, for reasons both fair and unfair, it is burdened with today. The New Republican Party I am speaking about is going to have room for the man and the woman in the factories, for the farmer, for the cop on the beat and the millions of Americans who may never have thought of joining our party before, but whose interests coincide with those represented by principled Republicanism. If we are to attract more working men and women of this country, we will do so not by simply “making room” for them, but by making certain they have a say in what goes on in the party. The Democratic Party turned its back on the majority of social conservatives during the 1960s. The New Republican Party of the late ’70s and ’80s must welcome them, seek them out, enlist them, not only as rank-and-file members but as leaders and as candidates.

The sort of people Reagan spoke of are no longer welcome among GOP decision makers. In fact, the party pretty much openly despises them. I’ve never heard of a party declaring war on its own supporters to the extent the GOP has done.

We knew this porkinertia was inevitable when Bronze Boehner was elected Leader over Shadegg and Pence.

And don’t forget Jeff Flake. The republican leadership actually punished him for being too outspoken against spending. And look at the two big spending, bully republicans from alaska. They always had their way and now both are under investigation for corruption.