"Here's your bumper sticker for the 2010 elections: It's the Spending, Stupid.

"Look at the astonishing numbers in the Rasmussen poll released last week. Nearly seven in 10 respondents (68%) want a smaller government, lower taxes and fewer services. The party breakdown: GOP, 88%; Democrats, 44%; and Other, 74%. In short, the independent voters who decide national elections have moved into the anti-spending column. I don't think they'll leave any time soon."

"With Congress back this week, Republicans need to get tough on taxes.

"That is, if the GOP hopes to prosper in November, party leaders need to get unambiguously with the American people -- and against the Obama administration -- in opposing tax increases.

"That is to say, they need to protect the soon-to-expire Bush-era tax cuts."

"Liberal interpretations that portray modern conservatism as standing athwart the 'rights revolution' of the 1960s are hard pressed to explain the growing number of minority and female candidates favored by the conservative rank and file. Marco Rubio, Nikki Haley, Susana Martinez, Brian Sandoval, Tim Scott, Ryan Frazier, Raul Labrador and Jaime Herrera are GOP nominees for the Senate, governorships and the House because Republican voters preferred them over their white opponents. Allen West in Florida and Jon Barela in New Mexico were the consensus GOP choices to run for competitive House seats. Many of these candidates are well-positioned to win their races and help change the public face of modern conservatism.

"The old conservatism-as-racism story has outlived all usefulness and accuracy. November might be a good time to start a rethink."

"Gallup has released a new poll asking respondents to assess the major accomplishments of Congress in the last two years: the national health care bill, the stimulus, the bailout of auto companies, the bailout of major banks and financial institutions, and the financial regulatory reform bill. The pollsters found majority opposition to all those measures, with the exception of financial reform. 

"The numbers: Bank bailouts, 61 percent disapprove versus 37 percent approve; national health care, 56 percent disapprove versus 39 percent approve; auto bailouts, 56 percent disapprove versus 43 percent approve; stimulus, 52 percent disapprove versus 43 percent approve. Only financial reform, with 61 percent approve versus 37 percent disapprove, is a winner for the representatives and senators seeking re-election."

"Have you forgotten, how it felt that day?
To see your homeland under fire
And her people blown away
Have you forgotten, when those towers fell ... 

"Have you forgotten?

"Have you forgotten?

"Have you forgotten?!”

"It's not too early to assess the damage done by America's 44th president. He squandered his mandate and the public's enormous good will. He alienated voters and dropped a heavy yoke on his party with useless spending and a shockingly unpopular health-care bill. With pressure mounting and a potentially epic loss looming, Mr. Obama has gone from a commanding, engaging candidate to an arrogant, self-pitying president. It is not pretty to witness."

"Politics in our two-party system is about coalition building, and any successful party must stretch across many groups. Republicans will have to accommodate much of the tea party agenda if they hope to assemble a new majority and avoid third-party challenges. But tea partiers who want to restore proper Constitutional limits, rather than merely pad the ratings of talk radio, might recall William F. Buckley Jr.'s counsel that his policy was to vote for the most conservative candidate who could win."

"Pres. Barack Obama’s plan for yet another round (!) of stimulus spending, this time focused on highway infrastructure work, is, like so many products of this administration, something other than what it seems. What Obama is proposing is another backdoor bailout for spendthrift states, such as his political home state of Illinois, giving them large injections of federal money so that they can redirect spending that would be dedicated to highway projects to other areas — e.g., to the government-employees’ unions that are Obama’s most loyal constituency. Call it 'No Blue-State Appropriator or Union Goon Left Behind, Part Whatever' ...

"This is the sort of horsepucky upon which President Obama proposes to lavish another $50 billion. Stop him."

"... [T]he House of Representatives was built with two-year terms for a reason: to be the barometer that measures both the pressures on the public and the pressures exerted by the public. At the Constitutional Convention of 1787, James Madison favored a three-year term, but the delegates settled on two years, in part, as Roger Sherman of Connecticut was quoted in the official notes of the proceedings, to assure that the representatives would not 'acquire the habits of the (capital) which might differ from those of their constituents.'"

"The last time Republicans benefited from a wave election, they had their own Beckian figure at the top in the person of House Speaker Newt Gingrich. They wallowed in their revolution and let Gingrich’s ideological grandeur define them — to their regret in the end. If the wave comes this time, Republicans should endeavor to be a sober and responsible party for sober and responsible people, resolutely cleaning up after the failed Obama revolution.

"They could do much worse than to take their cue from the tea partiers at the Lincoln Memorial, who knew how to make an impression without scaring anyone or trashing the place."