THE CRUMBLING GOP BASE

Some words of warning from Jeff Jacoby. Excerpts:

How disgruntled is the party's base? In recent polls, fewer than 70 percent of registered Republicans said they approve of the way President Bush is handling his job, a sharp drop from the 90 percent support on which he once could count. Among self-identified conservatives, Bush's standing is even lower: Just 51 percent rate his performance favorably, according to the latest New York Times/CBS poll. At a time when the president's support among Democrats has shrunk to single digits, and when only 1 independent in 4 gives him a positive job rating, the last thing he can afford to lose is the goodwill of his core supporters. But he is losing it.

And Congress is doing even worse. According to the most recent CBS News poll, while 59 percent of the public disapproves of the way the House and Senate are functioning, the figure among Republicans is 62 percent. Read that again: Republicans dislike the Republican-controlled Congress even more than Democrats and independents do....

Many on the right are no less acid in describing Bush. One conservative commentator described him recently as a "dime-store Democrat" and "something of an embarrassment" and wrote that "a Republican president and a Republican Congress have lost control of the federal budget and cannot resist the temptation to stop raiding the public fisc." It says something about Bush's willingness to listen to such criticism that the author of those words -- Tony Snow -- has just become the White House spokesman.

Reaganite conservatives have been the mainstay of the GOP for more than 20 years, and many of them are disgusted with the abandonment of Reaganite principles at both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue. If they had wanted skyrocketing budgets, new federal bureaucracies, more regulation of political speech, and stalemates on immigration, energy, and Social Security, they say, they would have voted for Democrats. Instead they voted for Republicans -- and what did they get? Skyrocketing budgets, new federal bureaucracies, more regulation of political speech, and stalemates on immigration, energy, and Social Security...

For the party's Reaganite core, the list of outrages is a long one, everything from steel tariffs to McCain-Feingold to gasoline demagoguery. Most troubling of all has been the explosive growth in the size and cost of government. On Bush's watch, the federal budget has grown twice as fast as during the Clinton years. Expenditures this year will come to nearly $24,000 per household -- the most, in real terms, since World War II. Not since Lyndon Johnson was in the White House has spending soared so recklessly.

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ELSEWHERE

Anything to shock: "Dutch pedophiles are launching a political party to push for a cut in the legal age for sexual relations from 16 to 12 and the legalisation of child pornography and sex with animals, sparking widespread outrage. The Charity, Freedom and Diversity (NVD) party said on its web site it would be officially registered tomorrow, proclaiming: "We are going to shake The Hague awake!" The party said it wanted to cut the legal age for sexual relations to 12 and eventually scrap the limit altogether. "A ban just makes children curious," Ad van den Berg, one of the party's founders, told the Algemeen Dagblad newspaper. "We want to make pedophilia the subject of discussion," he said, adding the subject had been a taboo since the 1996 Marc Dutroux child abuse scandal in neighbouring Belgium. "We want to get into Parliament so we have a voice. Other politicians only talk about us in a negative sense, as if we were criminals," Van den Berg said... The party also said everybody should be allowed to go naked in public and promotes legalising all soft and hard drugs and free train travel for all."

Immigration cowardice: ""The Senate isn't serious about enforcing the nation's immigration laws. It is bad enough that the bill that 39 Democrats and 23 Republicans just voted to pass provides an amnesty to illegal immigrants already here. There might be an argument for doing that if there were any evidence of a commitment to enforce the immigration laws in the future. But the bill actually prohibits local police from enforcing civil violations of immigration laws-which in practice, given the byzantine rules distinguishing between civil and criminal violations of those laws, will get local police out of the enforcement business altogether. No serious effort is being made to make the bureaucracy capable of the enforcement tasks that will now be asked of them, such as performing background checks on the illegal population. The bill forbids the federal government to use any information included in an application for amnesty in national-security or criminal investigations. Any federal agent who does use that information would be fined $10,000-which is five times more than an illegal alien would have to pay to get the amnesty... The Senate should stand down in favor of the House's enforcement-first approach, not the other way around. But it would be much better to enact no bill than to enact the Senate bill."

Bloated and overpaid U.S. Federal bureaucracy: "Compensation for the federal government's 1.9 million civilian workers in the executive branch costs almost $200 billion annually. Federal wages and benefits have been rising quickly, and by 2004 the average compensation of federal workers was almost twice the average in the private sector.... The average federal worker earned $100,178 in wages and benefits in 2004, which compared to $51,876 for the average private-sector worker, according to U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis data. Looking just at wages, federal workers earned an average $66,558, 56 percent more than the $42,635 earned by the average private worker."

More of Britain's very selective law-enforcement: "Thousands of illegal immigrants are being issued with national insurance numbers every year even though officials know that they have suspect immigration documents. Staff in Jobcentres have been told that they have a duty to issue an NI number even if they realise that the applicant has forged documents and no legal right to work, official papers seen by The Times reveal. The NI number, which employers regard as a prerequisite to work, can also be used to claim various benefits."

A notorious British failure to die at last: "The Child Support Agency will be scrapped this summer and replaced with a pared-down operation to collect cash from the most hardened absent fathers who refuse to pay maintenance. The Times has learnt that, in future, separating parents will be told to sort out their own financial arrangements with the help of national guidelines on appropriate levels of child maintenance. Cash incentives may even be offered to couples for staying away from the new, slimmed-down agency. The decision to abolish the CSA, which has been plagued with problems since it was set up in 1993, is an admission by the Government that it is unable to deal with the scale of the problem of maintenance payments after family break-up."

For more postings, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE and AUSTRALIAN POLITICS. (Mirror sites here, here, here, here, here, here and here).

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"All the worth which the human being possesses, all spiritual reality, he possesses only through the State." -- 19th century German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. Hegel is the most influential philosopher of the Left -- inspiring Karl Marx, the American "Progressives" of the early 20th century and university socialists to this day.

The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialistisch)

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