Thanks for reading, but I'm done

Due to lack of interest, I have stopped posting at Outside the Tower and, unless there is a popular outcry to draw me back (via comments on this post that will be emailed to me), I will likely never resume. Thanks to my small (but dedicated) readership for keeping it real.

--Longshott

Culture of Corruption in the GOP

Stephen Moore: eternally wrong on immigration, but invariably right on the need to clean up the Republican party:

"In the last five years, Republicans have enacted the largest increase in entitlement spending in three decades, doubled the education budget, nearly tripled the number of earmarked spending projects, and turned a blind eye toward the corrosive culture of corruption on Capitol Hill that seems so eerily reminiscent of the final days of Democratic rule in the House."

Republicans have become their own worst nightmare. We, the voters, unfortunately, are left with a reactionary socialist party (the Democrats), and a corrupt socialist party (GOP) w/ gestures (but no substance) in the right direction.

The Declining GOP

No, and it's not just for all of the reasons I have listed before. It is demographic. I have long recognized this problem and Pat Buchanan articulates it succinctly here. Basically, Bush's "vote-buying" tactics are mortgaging the future. He fails to do anything about illegal immigration in order to woo hispanic voters, but in the long-term this weakens the GOP. Hispanics will, before long, become a majority in this country. They already are in California and this is the reason the state leans so far to the socialist left. Gov. Schwarzennegar (sp?) put forward some very modest reform proposals a couple of months ago (really radical stuff like requiring unions to get the permission of their members before spending money on politics) and was rebuffed heartily at the polls. Who could possibly be against such innocuous and transparently helpful legislation? Take a look at the demographics of California, you will know. Also realize that California's demographics are quickly becoming America's.

The only solution...

to the intelligent design in school controversy. As Cato points out here, as long as the government has a virtual monopoly in education, we will have controversy after controversy because every interest group wants their viewpoint to be the "official" one. But since we all have different viewpoints and takes on life, there will never be a consensus and somebody will always be upset. The only answer is to allow people to choose what values and assumptions their educational institution will embrace a priori. There is no other solution. Read the piece.

The Reactionary Party Strikes Back

Joe Biden at Alito's Hearing today: [paraphrase] "we must decide if the court will change direction, or remain within the consensus that has existed for 70 years." Once again, the Democrats go to show that their shift from "liberal" to "reactionary" in the past 20 years is complete. They are utterly opposed to change for the sake of opposing change. They are committed to maintaining the status quo come what may and protecting privileged groups who support their reactionary ideology. Going by the dictionary there is nothing "liberal" about the Democratic party of 2006.

Franklin Delano Bush

Or so the Cato Institute has dubbed him. Although I usually don't find much common cause with anarchists, the folks at Cato are some of the rare people to see Bush for what he is. Read about it here. Conservatives have gotten so caught up in winning elections and defending the mistaken war in Iraq, that they have forgotten what conservatism used to mean: it was, at its core, a philosophy of limited government; a philosophy that appreciated the limits to what the government could accomplish and a philosophy that understood that government programs rob the beneficiaries of their dignity and rob those who pay for them of their freedom. Bush's "solve every problem by throwing money at it" has betrayed the core principle of conservatism. I often get replies from Bush's defenders that he is still a conservative because of: Tax Cuts, Aggressive Foreign Policy (although I don't know how conservative this is) and social values, but each of these aspects of conservatism is peripheral to the central aspect--limited government--and all of the tax cuts, wars, and god-talk in the world can't make up for the fact that Bush gets an F as a conservative because of his dramatic failures in limiting government.

Pay Millions to Congress

Don't know if that would solve our problems, but that is what Thomas Sowell, 5th smartest man in the country, thinks we should do to save our system. Read about it here.