Redstate

...You'll have you answer.

(And, it might surprise you, I think that is more likely to happen than many around here...)

assuming the Democrats win (retain?) control of both the House and the Senate, is a kind of mopey effort to finish the job sloppily.  There will be a symbolic, trumpeted "withdrawal" of some units who were already scheduled to rotate home.  

There will follow an upsurge in the resistance, a massive PR effort to blame it on Bush ("See, we told you it was worse than he said!"), and eventually either a reactive, micromanaged re-attack (not likely) or a complete withdrawal.

...it scores one as "Conservative" if one...

>supports gov't censorship of the press or internet.

>supports a military draft instead of professional military.

>supports issuance of a nat'l ID card.

It gets the Economic proclivities correct, but the only side of the aisle pushing restraints on speech and promoting a draft is the Left.

--furious

Haha.

It didn't ask about abortion, church/state, or guns.  I guess I'll send that check off to Cato now.

... then the likely effect of Holy Joe losing in the primary is that he'll be I-CT instead of D-CT next term. It's not like we Republicans have got someone who's credible in the race, and Lamont won't even be close to competitive with Leiberman in an election where independents and Republicans can vote.

a Libertarian? Me?

Although in my case (I would guess) it's closer to the truth than either of yours ;0)

Who's going to fund his campaign?  Jeffords won as a Republican and then became independent.  Sanders is technically independent but has the full backing of the Democratic Party.  Unless the Republicans back him or he receives significant outside funding he won't have a shot.  His best chance would be as a kingmaker.  I think a likely scenario would be Bush giving him a job if he fell in the primaries.  

For one thing, the leftist Democrat animus against the Iraq effort requires a lot of fact denial on their part.  That whole "Bush Lied" thing about the intelligence, for example, when it was Clinton-appointee George Tenet who said the WMD presence was a slam-dunk.

All their waffling on Iraq during the 2004 presidential race will resurface.  

And does anyone think that security in the Middle East would be better with Saddam in power now, along with Hamas governing the West Bank, a Libya with nukes and the nut in Teheran?

So, yes, the Dems have one big problem here.

Anyone who knows this test knows it's a bad political test, particularly since you can't really peg people down politically inside of ten questions, 5 economic, 5 social; which leaves out all of foreign policy.

It's basically a recruiting tool for the Libertarians to get people to take a look at their party.

If by some remote chance, Lieberman loses the primary, the GOP should absolutely back him 100%.  As should conservative blogs, in terms of fundraising.  

No one ever considered CT to be a chance for a pick-up, but if Lieberman wins as an independent, one of two things will happen: either he'll serve his term as an independent, thus depriving the Dems of a seat they might otherwise have to narrow the gap between them and us, or else he'd declare himself a Republican once he got into office, giving us an extra seat.  Either way, we win big.

Its far too late in the game to change the dynamics of the 2006 race. Which party gets to control congress will depend on two simple facts.

1. Finances. (Currently the repubs have a 4 to 1 advantage in fundraising.)
   
2. Conservative apathy. Conservatives still represent about 50% of the republican party, and conservative activists do the day to day footwork during campaigns. If they stay home this November because of the left leaning drift within the party, it won't matter how much money the republican party raises.

If I were a betting man I'd say the dems will retake congress primarily because they will get the vote out on election day, whereas conservatives will stay home.

If Lieberman loses the Dem primary and runs as an independent, I plan to vote for him, even though I normally vote straight GOP, and voted AGAINST him TWICE in 2000. I don't think a Republican can win this seat even in a 3-way race, but Lieberman is MUCH better than Lamont. Too many votes for a Republican "sacrificial lamb" might give Lamont the victory with 40% of the vote.  

Lieberman is about the best we can get from this state...

If the republicans can't do something about Immigration should they remain a winning coalition ?

I really find the Democrats laughable and because they have a measure of power scary. Not because I disagree with them on the Issues. I do disagree but I appreciate honest disagreement. I find the democrats scary because they cant seem to manage the most obvious pieces of the political calculas. Don't pick fights on issues you are certain to lose. (e.g. Culture of corruption when your party is rotten to the core, compare the troops to nazis while we are at war, call an across the board tax cut a cut for the rich and demand that it be removed, Have howard dean as your part spokesman/fund raiser). To me the scale of the democrat blunders boggles the mind. Its as if they aren't trying and it certainly augurs that they should be no where near the levers of power.

As bad as the Democrats are, in 6 years the republicans have accomplished precious little. The president has accomplished much that I admire and somehow has gotten virtually no credit for his effort. Congress is however still trying to get judges out of comittee and can't even agree on agenda for pork.

Now comes immigration. An issue 90% of the American people are in agreement over and we can't get border enforcement or a federal mandate to get cities to repeal sanctuary laws ? GIVE ME A BREAK Enough the of the GOP be just a hair better than the libs. If they cant get this done throw em all out.

For a Republican House to survive this year, it will have noisily kill the Senate version of "comprehensive immigration reform." The question is whether it has the will to do so. The Senate will remain Republican at least through 2008, but only nominally so.

Immigration has the potential to do to the GOP exactly what gun control and abortion did to the Democrats: cause conservative and moderate voters in the Rocky Mountain West and the Southeast to look at alternatives. If this happens, the nation will be left with two minority parties that desperately will seek, with each election cycle, to buy votes through the expansion of the welfare state to co-opt a larger and more socialistic bloc of immigrants. Under this scenario, the real question is whether a real conservative third party will emerge over a period of decades.

In other words, the era of big government will be back, if it ever did truly go away.

The base will not come out if the dems are centrist enough.

which he won't (take that to the bank), but just for fun if he does, he will win as an Independent.  The thought that all his money will dry up is not true, some will but some won't.  He doesn't need money to run for Senate from CT tho, his name recognition is probably 99.9%.  

However, when he wins as an Independent he will still caucaus with the Dems and his liberal voting record will still be 75% (take away his Iraq war votes and what would it be?  90%?)  No, a Liberman win will still be helpful on the GWOT but for judges, environment, taxes, etc, useless.

With only a handful of exceptions in the Senate, the House has been the bastion of Conservative thought and action.

In every instance of big spending, bad immigration policy, compromised judicial action, abrogation of essential rights, retreat on Conservative principles - the Senate has been in the forefront. There are eight primary offenders: Snow, Collins, Warner, Sphincter, Graham, McCain (but I repeat myself), DeWine, and Chaffee (maybe Voinovich). If any three or four of these senators were replaced, we would be in a radically different place regarding the Conservative agenda.

The House will hold in this election.

The Senate, maybe.

The true conservatives have no worries (other than Santorum). The dems have nothing, I repeat nothing, to run on. Oh sure, the nut-roots will be out in force, but they vote for complete Lefties - not the type that will motivate the majority of sane democrats to get out qnd vote.

The way they could win is that the republican base stays home. In the case of milquetoast Republicans, I'd say that's a good bet.

I'm fortunate in that my Senator (Allen) and Congressman (Goode) are both on the right side of the issues, and will walk into victory in November. This election comes down to who will be willing to tolerate someone they don't like versus someone who they can't stand.

Are we on the same planet? You undercut an otherwise interesting post with such silliness.

Libya gave up its WMD program after Qaddafi thought he might be the next port of call for the American military.  Did he have nukes?  No.  Was he trying?  Yes.  Would he have succeeded?  Thankfully GWB saw to it that answer will remain hypothetical.  

BTW, you do know that Pakistan does have nukes, don't you?  I bet 10 years ago you might have been making the same statement about them.

...is sound. Even Beinart in his new book apologizes to liberals for his support of the invasion.

You can assert that we could have allowed Saddam to survive in a post-9/11 atmosphere to reconstitute his nasties. But you should not be taken seriously. Democrats do this every day.

I'm sorry but Lieberman dug his own grave and it has little to do with his support of Iraq.

When you stump for the opposition, don't expect open arms when it's time to get re-elected.

Though I've read something like, he would need to turn in signitures to run as an independant the day after the dem primary..

Lieberman was once solidly pro-vouchers...

If he goes down in the primary (which I don't think he will --he was endorsed by KOS) I'll donate to his campaign.

You're trying to say that kingronjo's statement is a logical fallacy -- 'this follows that, therefore that caused this'.  However, kingronjo didn't claim 'that caused this' simply BECAUSE this followed that.  He didn't need to resort to logical sleight of hand:

See the WSJ:

[Col. Gadhafi] also called Hosni Mubarak in a panic, convinced that Mr. Bush would attack Libya once the Taliban had been crushed in Afghanistan, according to a cable from the U.S. Embassy in Cairo reported last month [April 2006] by Time.

...

As U.S. and British troops began flooding into Kuwait, Col. Gadhafi grew agitated, diplomats said. Italian press accounts quote then-Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi as saying that Col. Gadhafi had called him to say he feared he would be America's next target. "Tell them I will do whatever they want," said one diplomat, recounting the call. In early March 2003 just days before the start of the Iraq war, Saif and Musa Kusa, a top Libyan intelligence official, contacted the British to say that Col. Gadhafi wanted to "clear the air" about WMD programs in exchange for assurances that the U.S. would not try to topple his regime, according to several accounts.

Libyans close to the Gadhafi family told me that after Saddam Hussein's sons were killed in a shootout with U.S. soldiers in Mosul in July 2003, Safiya, Col. Gadhafi's wife, angrily demanded that he do more to ensure that Saif and her other sons would not share a similar fate. Then, in early October 2003, the U.S., the U.K., Germany and Italy interdicted the "BBC China," a German ship destined for Libya that the Americans had been tracking for nearly a year.

I'll spell it out: Libya's renunciation of their active nuclear weapons program (has bogornes heard of A.Q. Khan?) followed the invasion of both Afghanistan and Iraq.  And those invasions -- along with the capture of that ship -- WERE the cause of Gadhafi's rondevous with sanity.

The flip side of 'post hoc ergo propter hoc': all true causes MUST precede their effect (at least until I finish my time machine); you can't dismiss a hypothetical cause simply because it preceeds a given effect.  That's an even worse logical fallacy.

if Republicans are only slightly better than Democrats, or going-away better?

Don't you want to vote for whoever is "better," no matter by how much?

Besides, it is simply silly to claim there "isn't much difference" between the parties.

Not much difference on taxes?

Not much difference on the War on Terror?

Not much difference on the UN?

Not much difference on gay marriage?

Not much difference on federal priorities?

Not much difference on spending proclivities?

Puh-leeze!  As weak as the GOP comes through on some issues, they are still head and shoulders above the Democrats on most of them.  To claim there is only a small difference is to be . . . imperceptive, to put it charitably.

Lieberman will NOT join th GOP caucus.  Rasmussen has him winning even as an independent (I don't have a link, sorry, but just go to Rasmussen's site and I'm sure you can find it).

Unless we provide him meaningful support, he will not join the GOP.  BUT, he will probably be none too happy with the Democrats and may be willing to buck them more often than he has in the last several years.  If he knows he can win without the wingnuts from the Democrat Party he won't feel beholden to them.

But I doubt, in the end, that Joe will get his assignments from us in the way that Jeffords gets his committee placements from the Democrats.

...are apathetically blowing the doors off Dem fundraisers just so they can burn big bonfires of money on election day?

that is the theory du jour in the defeatist wing of the Republican party.

Some may stay home but the key difference, as I see it, between us and the Dems on this issue is that if the House kills the immigration bill the issue, to the extent that it encourages GOPers/conservatives to stay home, goes away.

I don't see how the Dems do that with Iraq.