http://corner.nationalreview.com/post/?q=Y2M3YWUxZWE5YTZlNzI5MGRkYzM5YmQ4NDkwMTAzNDA=

Tom Ridge in Congress [David Freddoso]
We keep hearing again and again that Tom Ridge is a supporter of abortion rights and that he’s less conservative than Pat Toomey. Both statements are correct. But just what kind of Congressman was he?

Fact is, it really depends on what year you’re looking at. He moved from left to right over time. Near the end of his congressional career, as he prepared his gubernatorial run, Ridge was a 60-70 percent voter on the American Conservative Union’s issues. Earlier on, he voted like a moderate Democrat, with ratings as low as the 30s.

A few key votes that Ridge took: He voted to expand welfare eligibility (1984), to fund abortions with public money, and in favor of the fairness doctrine (in 1987). Ridge voted against an early school choice program in 1992. He also voted for a number of union priorities — in 1988, he voted to re-hire the air traffic controllers who had gone toe-to-toe with President Reagan seven years earlier and lost. Ridge voted against SDI repeatedly, and against some tax cuts.

The bottom line is that as a member of Congress, Tom Ridge had a liberal streak that goes far beyond abortion. But his record still puts him to the right of Arlen Specter.

On the campaign trail this week, John Edwards said this: “We will do stem cell research. We will stop juvenile diabetes, Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s and other debilitating diseases. America just lost a great champion for this cause in Christopher Reeve. People like Chris Reeve will get out of their wheelchairs and walk again with stem cell research.”

Is this really the kind of person Barack Obama wanted or needed to have on his team? A defector and turncoat, no less, who is more concerned with securing his campaign funds, pork and other special assistance without which he couldn’t even hope to win…

If you listen to the RINOs, it’s guys like this that we need to keep us from the political wilderness for the next 40 years.

I say, whatever. I’d rather not have a majority in congress for the rest of my life than have garbage like this infest the party.

When Arlen Specter became a Democrat, the average IQ of both parties went up 10%.

warbaby on May 4, 2009 at 10:06 AM

Do you mean the first time he became a democrat 1960′s? You must because he was never really a true republican. He ran on the republican ticket because it was convenient for him to do so. Not out of any conservative conviction.

550,000 Americans die of cancer every year, about 3,300,000 over the 6 years of the Heritage study. Over these same years about 7,000 Americans died due to terrorism/islamist insurgence (3,000 here in the US plus another 4,000 over in the desert). Still, while cancer death outnumber war/terrorism death by a factor of almost 500, we spent $521 billion on defense in 2006, more than a hundred times what we spent on finding a cure to cancer.

This is the dumbest comparison I’ve heard in a long time.

We did not spend all those billions so that 7,000 Americans WOULD die from terrorism. We spent them so that millions WOULD NOT die from terrorism.

What a bunch of morons these lefties are.

I got a dose of reality watching a documentary a few years ago about clinical trials. (I was interested because my mom was dying from breast cancer.) It showed a clinical trial of children who had a rare version of childhood leukemia and the medication they were being given seemed to be curing several of the children. The doctor was so excited and called the pharmaceutical company requesting more of this medication…it showed her literally crying because the rep told her that they decided to stop making this medication. They explained that since it wasn’t a common type of leukemia…they’d lose money. They put shareholders over some dying children…that they had a cure for.

Yesterday, I wouldn’t have believed Specter could do anything to make himself any more repugnant.

Unbelievable.

When Arlen Specter became a Democrat, the average IQ of both parties went up 10%.

warbaby on May 4, 2009 at 10:06 AM

:)

Video: Specter says he would have cured Kemp if GOP had listened
Arlen Specter went a bit too far after being asked to justify his party switch yesterday. Specter told Face the Nation that had the GOP listened to him and spent billions more……