We actually have a principled debate in the Senate race

For a guy who backed Bob Marshall as fervently as I did, I must admit I’m stunned (delighted, but stunned nonetheless) to see such a principled fight in the Gilmore-Warner race.

I had hoped Gilmore would be able to out up a good fight on the tax issue, but I never expected a detailed economic argument about two critical issues (energy and health care), and that’s exactly what we’re getting courtesy of Gilmore.

Warner’s attempt to parlay conventional wisdom shibboleths into sounds bites used to ward off Gilmore have blown up in his face.  He tried to make Gilmore look like a heartless brute on health care for poor children, but only succeeded in exposing how his socialized-medicine scheme nearly bankrupted the Commonwealth (Gilmore has more on this via Spank That Donkey).  Meanwhile, Warner’s blase dismissal of Gilmore’s call for more oil drilling has turned into an illuminating lesson in economics and commodity trading (National Review Online).

So here we are, in July, and Gilmore has already opened up holes in Warner’s policy armor that can be exploited in August and the fall, as more voters pay attention in the fall.  This race could really make some surprising turns, especially if Obama forces Virginia to remember Warner’s largest political legacy - Tim Kaine.

Kaine cancels event

Why does this matter?  Well, when would-be Vice Presidential nominees suddenly cancel appearances out of the blue . . . (Jim Geraghty).

Who is Ted Weschler?

Amidst the back-and-forth over which candidate for Attorney General raised more money, the Brownlee folks made a large stink about Ken Cuccinelli’s decision to shift his State Senate fund balance to his AG candidacy.  They tut-tutted about how they had raised more funds than Ken had (via RRZ).  As it turns out, though, Brownlee’s biggest donor raises serious questions about the kind of Republican he’d be.

As Jason Kenney notes, Brownlee’s biggest donor (so far) is R. Ted Weschler, a Charlottesville stockbroker with an interesting donor history:

I don’t know Mr. Weschler’s roots, but I can see how he’s contributed in the past and that has me a little concerned for the Brownlee campaign:

$20,000 to Mark Warner’s One Virginia PAC

$20,000 to Tim Kaine’s Moving Virginia Forward PAC

$20,000 to Tim Kaine for Governor

$500 to Warner for Governor

And perhaps quite notable to Conservatives:

$12,500 to Virginian’s For Responsible Government

Virginians for Responsible Government was set up in 2002 by a group of business leaders to defend the Senate “Gang of Five” Republicans — Chichester, Norment, Stolle, Stosch and Wampler — from intraparty challenge from conservatives.

Brownlee has shown his concern for questions of his conservative credentials (see BD: Brownlee takes exception to Kenney comments). Given his lack of a legislative record, there are going to be many more questions and people are going to look at things like donors for answers.

This is not a very good answer to Conservatives.

Actually, it’s worse than even Jason and JR (Bearing Drift) realize.  One of Weschler’s “Republican” recipients (to the tune of $19,500) was James C. Wheat, a 2007 candidate for Delegate in Henrico County who endorsed Kaine (Elephant Ears) and has since endorsed Mark Warner (Lynchubrg News and Advance).  So Weschler’s $60K to Democrats looks a lot more like $80K.

Now, if John Brownlee had a record of defending limited government in Virginia politics, none of this would be at issue.  However, all he has is a record that never touched upon state issues, the backing of a large chunk of the GOP establishment that gave us so much trouble in the first place, and Ted Weschler’s money.  That’s not the best combination.

Reid’s Omnibus spending bill stopped by filibuster!!

By a vote of 52-40 (60 votes are needed to break a filibuster), the Senate refused to close debate on Harry Reid’s Omnibus spending bill.  Thanks to Senator Tom Coburn, thirty-nine of his fellow Republicans (not a single Democrat voted with the taxpayers) and all of you who contacted them, we’ve managed to stave off $10 billion in unnecessary government spending.

At least we have for today; odds are Reid and his fellow Democrats will try again tomorrow.  So please, take a look at the vote, and be sure to thank the Senators who voted No, and let the ones who voted Yes how disappointed you are.

Today turned out to be a decent day for the taxpayer!

Uranium cache in Pittsylvania “seventh largest in the world”

There is enough uranium under Pittsylvania County to supply all the nuclear plants in the United States for two years – and we can’t mine it due to a law Chuck Robb signed during the post-Three-Mile-Island hysteria (Wall Street Journal, h/t LightHorse at VV).  The more I read about this, the angrier I get.

Memo to Bob McDonnell: Do you wan me to stop being so leery of you?  Support lifting the nonsensical ban on uranium mining!

Another good day for McCain shot to hell . . . by McCain

I think I can actually hear Leslie, in her reserved but firm voice, saying, “I told you so.”

From Ramesh Ponnuru (NRO - The Corner):

Moving the Table   [Ramesh Ponnuru]

March 2007:

Ponnuru: If you could get the Democrats to agree, or at least to come to the table on entitlements or on tax simplification, are those circumstances under which you’d be willing to accept a tax increase?

Sen. McCain: No; no.

PONNURU:  No circumstances?

Sen. McCain: No. None. None.

Yesterday: 

MCCAIN: I am a supporter of sitting down together and putting everything on the table and coming up with an answer. So, there is nothing I would take off the table. There was nothing I would demand.

I think that’s the way that Ronald Reagan and Tip O’Neill did it. And that’s what we have to do again. . . . I have said and will say, I will say that everything has to be on the table, if we’re going to reach a bipartisan agreement. I’ve been in bipartisan negotiations before. I know how you reach a conclusion. We all have to sit down together with everything on the table.

STEPHANOPOULOS: So, that means payroll tax increases are on the table, as well?

MCCAIN: There is nothing that’s off the table. I have my positions, and I’ll articulate them. But nothing’s off the table.

I don’t want tax increases. Of course I’d like to have young Americans have some of their money put into an account with their name on it. But that doesn’t mean that anything is off the table…

And we were doing so well . . .

This is one of those times where it becomes clear once and for all that the GOP needs to move beyond Ronald Reagan.  Reagan made mistakes, and no mistake was bigger than the 1983 tax hike to “save” Social Security (that is what McCain referenced with the “way that Ronald Reagan and Tip O’Neill did it” comment).  Marty Williams has an entire blog devoted to cobbling together Reagan’s errors and using it as cover for big-government Republicans.

When I said McCain had to discuss domestic issues, opening the door to a tax increase was not what I had in mind.

A cheer and a half for Bill Howell

Speaker Bill Howell was not happy with the treatment accorded him by the Washington Post when the special session ended; nor should he be.  The special session was the Speaker’s finest hour in many years: he held the party together, walked away from the legacy of tax increases that stained the party in 2004 and 2007, came up with a creative plan, and generally improved the local GOP “brand.”  The Post didn’t seem to notice any of that, and Howell got upset.

His response to the Post was a bit disjointed.  In fact, Howell, sent a shiver down my spine with this line in paragraph two:

Kaine can’t be surprised about state Republicans’ determination to oppose statewide tax increases.

Call it paranoia; call it excessive parsing of the language; call it whatever you like; but I always worry when Republican use qualifiers in expressing their opposition to tax hikes, particularly the “statewide” qualifier.  That one leaves the door open to regional tax hikes – the very thing that killed the party last year.

To be fair to Howell, though, he goes back-and-forth between the dreaded “statewide” qualifier and no qualifier at all.  That in itself is an improvement from before the special session.

Howell needs to be careful; he only got halfway there with this op-ed.  If he wants me and the rest of the low-tax crew fully in his corner, he has to follow Bill Bolling’s example and oppose all tax increases, without qualifiers.

In other words (as weird as this sounds), he has to say as he did.

Huh? Part II

Hours after Rasmussen had McCain clawing back toward even with Barack Obama, a USA Today/Gallup poll has the Republican ahead among likely voters:

Republican presidential candidate John McCain moved from being behind by 6 points among “likely” voters a month ago to a 4-point lead over Democrat Barack Obama among that group in the latest USA TODAY/Gallup Poll . . .

The Friday-Sunday poll, mostly conducted as Obama was returning from his much-publicized overseas trip and released just this hour, shows McCain now ahead 49%-45% among voters that Gallup believes are most likely to go to the polls in November. In late June, he was behind among likely voters, 50%-44%.  Among registered voters, McCain still trails Obama, but by less. He is behind by 3 percentage points in the new poll (47%-44%) vs. a 6-point disadvantage (48%-42%) in late June.

Oddly enough Gallup how has both outlier polls.  This one with USA Today is the best for McCain, while their own tracking poll has Obama up eight, his best of the recent bunch.

Now that we have all that squared away . . .

Please help Tom Coburn stop Harry Reid’s Omnibus spending bill

Today the United States Senate is taking up the innocuously-titled Advancing America’s Priorities bill. In reality, the bill is Congressional log-rolling at its worst.

The bill is really a hodgepodge of various would-be government programs that have been halted by Senator Tom Coburn.  I gave Coburn’s reasons in my previous post, but here it is again (from the Washington Post, emphasis added):

Coburn, an obstetrician and gynecologist elected to the Senate in 2004, believes that many lawmakers propose duplicative programs without any way of measuring their effectiveness. His negotiating stance with the other 99 senators is fairly straightforward.

“If we pass a new program, we either ought to get rid of the old program or we ought to make it to where it blends with this other one so it’s effective,” Coburn said in an interview last week. “Almost everything that they’ve offered has a duplicate program out there that they’re not either eliminating or changing.”

Coburn has turned his office into its own accountability unit. Aides must comb every piece of legislation headed to the floor for potential government waste.

His staff estimates that waste and fraud costs taxpayers $300 billion a year.

The duplicative and unnecassry programs crammed together in this omnibus fiasco – the brainchild of Harry Reid – is more than $10 billion.  Reid, probably figures he can roll over Coburn with the votes of the Democrats and weak-kneed Republicans who are more interested in getting their name in a press release than doing their actual job.  Who knows, maybe Reid is right.

That won’t stop Coburn from trying to stop him, and it won’t stop me either.

So, dear readers, if you have the time, please call or e-mail your Senators and ask them to oppose the Reid omnibus fiasco (otherwise known as S. 3297) when it comes up for a vote.  With any luck, enough Senators will see through Reid’s little farce to stage a successful filibuster or provide enough votes to sustain a veto (of course, that would mean leaning on the President, too).  With a lot of luck, we could convince enough Senators to vote this down.

At the very least, though, we can give them something to ponder before blindly voting for bigger, more expensive, and less efficient government.

Tom Coburn for Vice President

Ever since he surprised a whole bunch of people and endorsed John McCain prior to the South Carolina primary, I have always believed Tom Coburn had a shot at the second spot on the ticket.  I’ve never really explained, however, why this would please me so much.  As it turns out, the Washington Post did it for me:

Coburn, an obstetrician and gynecologist elected to the Senate in 2004, believes that many lawmakers propose duplicative programs without any way of measuring their effectiveness. His negotiating stance with the other 99 senators is fairly straightforward.

“If we pass a new program, we either ought to get rid of the old program or we ought to make it to where it blends with this other one so it’s effective,” Coburn said in an interview last week. “Almost everything that they’ve offered has a duplicate program out there that they’re not either eliminating or changing.”

Coburn has turned his office into its own accountability unit. Aides must comb every piece of legislation headed to the floor for potential government waste.

His staff estimates that waste and fraud costs taxpayers $300 billion a year.

Coburn’s determination has made him the Senate’s “Dr. No.”  His refusal to budge on principle has made him infamous in the deal-making world of the Senate:

. . . Reid leaves it up to the legislation’s sponsor to try to negotiate with Coburn. But the normal legislative give-and-take has no appeal to him. Coburn does not accept earmarks, the spending for pet projects that lawmakers insert into bills. And because of a self-imposed two-term limit, Coburn has no aspirations to become a committee chairman or party leader, so he does not need to do any favors for colleagues.

While Ron Paul has gotten most of the headlines with his presidential campaign, Coburn has been blocking real government expansion and inefficiencies (yes, I know, Dr. Paul can only do so much in the House).  More to the point, he has none of Paul foreign policy baggage.

In short, he would be a terrific running-mate for McCain.  Nothing would better show to disgruntled right-wingers that McCain is serious about cutting government down to size.  This pick would also keep McCain away from the GOP establishment, an entity that does the nominee more harm than good.  MSM wouldn’t be happy (the Postaccount is hardly flatering), but it’s already all-in for Obama as it is.  Most importantly, Coburn would give McCain’s campaign a domestic policy agenda, something I still think the GOP desperately needs, and make McCain’s play for the “change” mantle far more credible.

I can’t say what McCain will do, but I’m more convinced than ever of what he should do: nominate Tom Coburn for Vice President.