RedStateEclectic

Pawlenty orders state agencies to decline "discretionary" federal health care cash

Republican Gov. Tim Pawlenty Tuesday ordered all state agencies to not to submit applications to any health care funding from the federal government related to the health care overhaul.

Any applications must be either required by law or approved by the governor's office.

Pawlenty, who appears to be gearing up for a run for president in 2012, has long decried the health care overhaul, which opponents call Obamacare, and has pledged to join a lawsuit to undo it.

“Obamacare is an intrusion by the federal government into personal health care matters and it’s an explosion of federal spending that does nothing to make health care more affordable,” Pawlenty said in a news release.

via www.startribune.com

That's a nice start. I'm going to have to read up more about Gov. Pawlenty. Click on the link to read the Executive Order he issued.

An Interesting Republican

Gary Johnson likes being called "the most interesting Republican you've never heard of" and a probable candidate for president.An article that appeared in the online magazine Salon calling him both of those things "said it all," he told The Des Moines Register Monday.Johnson, the former governor of Democrat-heavy New Mexico, has visited 26 states since December, trying to attract attention. He's not officially campaigning, but has a 501(c)(4) nonprofit advocacy organization that lets him raise money and share political opinions.

via www.desmoinesregister.com

Note, this article about Gov. Gary Johnson--who, it would seem, might be looking for an apartment in Iowa after the first of the year! Eric L. and I tossed this around in some comments yesterday--it sure seems as if Johnson is "in".

Be sure to read the rest. If the economy is the issue, Johnson would seem to have some serious ground to run on.

Roses for Laura

To greet Laura, our wonderful RSE-hostess, and my fellow bloggers, let me offer you this bunch of somewhat unorthodox roses.

Like the colours? You can grow your own multi-colour roses.

To grow a rainbow coloured rose, consider that petals get their nourishment through the stem. The trick is to split the stem into several channels and dip each one in water of a different coulour. This way all the colours will be drawn by the stem into the petals and the rose will have all the colours in it.

The method works for other flowers too.

The source.

Had Enough Government Regulation?

Glen Allport goes on the offensive, in an in-depth and blistering attack toward all things governmental:

With a small, restrained government, there isn't much coercive State power for industry and other special interests to co-opt. As a government becomes larger and more powerful, this changes. With today's overgrown federal government, the power that corporations can purchase (via lobbying and other methods) is almost limitless.

Given that, it should be no surprise that government-imposed and government-run regulation in the United States is very different in effect from market-based regulation as exemplified by Underwriter Labs and other such groups. Contemporary examples of this sad reality are all around us (and in the links embedded in the text below). Despite the good that government regulation does and despite the honest, competent, hard work of many government employees in the regulatory agencies, the net result of our government-supplied regulation is negative – and often extremely negative, as detailed below.

Full Article.

His piece is long but really drives home the point so well that, if read, even the most state-lusting demublican could reconsider his ways.

Sen. Tom Coburn: Newt Gingrich 'last person I'd vote for' - Andy Barr

Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) is pouring cold water on the idea of former House Speaker Newt Gingrich running for president. “He's the last person I'd vote for for president of the United States,” Coburn said during a town hall event in Wagoner, Okla., over the weekend, as was reported by the Tulsa World. In explaining why he wouldn't support Gingrich, Coburn specifically targeted the ex-speaker’s three marriages as proof that Gingrich “doesn't know anything about commitment to marriage.” “His life indicates he does not have a commitment to the character traits necessary to be a great president,” said Coburn, who also noted that Gingrich is a “super-smart man.” Coburn’s comments follow criticism of Gingrich from his second wife, Marianne, who recently told Esquire that there is “no way” her ex-husband could become president. Prior to his election to the Senate in 2000, Coburn served in the House under Gingrich's rule and frequently criticized the then-speaker. A spokesman for Gingrich did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

via www.politico.com

I don't agree with him on absolutely everything, but I've always kind of liked Tom Coburn. He gets my "thumbs up" here.

The Palmer House - Frank Lloyd Wright

What a great way of spending a weekend (see the below clip).

Enjoy Frank Lloyd Wright`s Palmer House.

See also my posts Falling Water (with an animated fast motion re-construction of Frank Lloyd Wright`s masterpiece, and some lovely music accompanying the clip) and Falling Water - Frank Lloyd Wright (with a biographical account of the famous architect's life and career).

The Michigan GOP Convention

We Michiganders didn't have many liberty candidates in our races to begin with and we won even fewer  primaries. The Republican Liberty Caucus (RLC) didn't endorse anybody in the gubernatorial race that eventually produced former Gateway CEO Rick Snyder as the GOP candidate. 

Now, one of the things that make Michigan unique is the fact that many of the candidates for state office are picked by the party delegates, as opposed to the public ballot box, and that includes the position of Lieutenant Governor.  Historically, the candidate picks a running mate and the delegates vote that candidate in as a matter of routine.

This year was different, almost.  The TEA Party was out in force, and they decided to try to vote in their choice of businessman Bill Cooper for Lieutenant Governor over Snyder's pick of State Representative Brian Calley. Chaos briefly ensued because the convention simply wasn't prepared to have this vote.

(I didn't win a precinct delegate position this year, but my husband did, and was an alternate in the state convention. I wasn't sure I would be able to get into the state convention, so I didn't attend. DH did, and sent me the following report from the floor.)

What could be the greatest co- opting of the Tea Party movement to date took place today at the Michigan State GOP convention. To make matters worse, the wound was self inflicted.

With a large enough portion of the delegates made up of Tea Party and Liberty affiliations to force verbal "welcome to our big tent" praise from virtually every speaker, candidates raced to show TP support or claim they promoted TP agendas since Reagan was a child.

The shot to the foot occurred when the TP chose to nominate Bill Cooper to oppose Rick Snyder's Lt Gov choice Brian Curry. The opposition stemmed largely from Curry's support of the Michigan Business Tax. No doubt a premature show of strength played in to this move as well.

With Curry not the party choice, a late nominee and not on the printed ballot,  there was a quick attempt to dismiss the nomination with a show of hands vote.

Too bad there wasn't video. The Convention Chair briefly tried to pretend he was going to take this vote by a show of hands. In a basketball arena. He stood up in the middle of the floor, and acted like he was actually counting hands.  In a basketball arena, where alternates and guests weren't separated from the voting delegates. 

This ridiculous attempt was met with considerable and very vocal opposition, and attempts to continue the process were shouted down. Calls for a roll call vote began to pick up support with the delegates increasingly wanting to have the say. At that point the party establishment huddled for about 15 minutes and then Curry abruptly withdrew his nomination, leaving only the TP that nominated him looking foolish.

I have several thoughts on this. I think that any Republican who voted for the Michigan Business Tax should be ousted from the party, so I'm not a Calley fan.  But from a pragmatic viewpoint, I suspect part of Snyder's decision to tap him lies in the fact that Calley has significant legislative experience, something  that Snyder lacks entirely. As much as I would like to see the old guard handed a loss, I suspect that the reality is that two businessmen with no Lansing connections would have an awfully tough time getting anything accomplished.

Not only would two outsiders have trouble working with Lansing, there's not any way to be sure that Snyder would even accept Cooper. Trying to undermine him before he's even had a chance to get his hands dirty seems short-sighted. Snyder has reached out to everybody who will listen to him, and even drew support from the Democrats in the primaries. Heaven knows he's not the most conservative candidate, but he is an outsider, something that he shares with the TEA Party.  There will be plenty of fights to pick, especially with the Michigan Republican brand which doesn't have a strong record of actually spending less money than the Democrats, but I don't think that this was the right place to start.

But there is a bright side. While the TEA Party made a political move that failed, no politicians in the game win with every move they make.  The important point is that they actually made a point, and that is that there are a lot of them, and they are a force that must be dealt with.  If the party wants these people to vote for their candidates, the party will need to do some serious internal compromising, something I believe Snyder will do, especially now that he's heard their voices live and loud.

Who’s Going to Be Running?

So, just for the fun of it, let’s try to come up with a list of likely candidates for President in 2012.  I’m not talking about people we’d necessarily LIKE to see, but people who—by virtue of their actions seem to be headed in that direction.  Republicans, of course, are the most obvious, but who knows?  It’s always possible that if the perception of President Obama is one of weakness, that some renegade might choose to challenge him in the way the Ted Kennedy did (unsuccessfully) in 1980 against Jimmy Carter.

Here are my first few names, in no particular order (feel free to add to the list in the comment section):

 

Republicans:

Gov. Tim Pawlenty

Gov. Haley Barbour

Gov. Sarah Palin

Gov. Gary Johnson

Gov. Mitt Romney

Who else do you think is going to run, based on their current actions and history?

Charlie Chaplin’s Message Lives On

The Biggest Lie: Sea Level Rise

Personally, I think the idea that we can print our way to prosperity is bigger, but this one is up there too. (So many lies, so little time). It’s not that often that I color an entire paragraph red…

But if there is one scientist who knows more about sea levels than anyone else in the world it is the Swedish geologist and physicist Nils-Axel Mörner, formerly chairman of the INQUA International Commission on Sea Level Change. And the uncompromising verdict of Dr Mörner, who for 35 years has been using every known scientific method to study sea levels all over the globe, is that all this talk about the sea rising is nothing but a colossal scare story.

[…] When running the International Commission on Sea Level Change, he launched a special project on the Maldives, whose leaders have for 20 years been calling for vast sums of international aid to stave off disaster. Six times he and his expert team visited the islands, to confirm that the sea has not risen for half a century. Before announcing his findings, he offered to show the inhabitants a film explaining why they had nothing to worry about. The government refused to let it be shown.

Similarly in Tuvalu, where local leaders have been calling for the inhabitants to be evacuated for 20 years, the sea has if anything dropped in recent decades. The only evidence the scaremongers can cite is based on the fact that extracting groundwater for pineapple growing has allowed seawater to seep in to replace it. Meanwhile, Venice has been sinking rather than the Adriatic rising, says Dr Mörner.

One of his most shocking discoveries was why the IPCC has been able to show sea levels rising by 2.3mm a year. Until 2003, even its own satellite-based evidence showed no upward trend. But suddenly the graph tilted upwards because the IPCC's favoured experts had drawn on the finding of a single tide-gauge in Hong Kong harbour showing a 2.3mm rise. The entire global sea-level projection was then adjusted upwards by a "corrective factor" of 2.3mm, because, as the IPCC scientists admitted, they "needed to show a trend".

Wow. To what extent will politicians go (government scientists included) to scare us? Check out the one-minute time mark of the video below.

Now THAT’s funny.