House Speaker John Boehner took issue with  preliminary analysis from the Congressional Budget Office which found that repealing Obamacare “would add about $230 billion to the federal deficit over the next ten years“:

“I do not believe that repealing the job killing health care law will increase the deficit,” Boehner told reporters Thursday. “The CBO is entitled to their opinion, but they’re locked into the constraints of the 1974 Budget Act. …If you believed that repealing Obamacare is going to raise the deficit, then you would have to have some way to offset that spending. But I don’t think anybody in this town believes that repealing Obamacare is going to increase the deficit.”

Recall that the CBO used gimmicks to score the bill as a cost-cutting measure when later studies found the Democrats’ overhaul would do exactly the opposite.

That is why we commend Majority Leader Eric Cantor for his H.R. 2, the simple measure to repeal the unpopular and lengthy legislation.  Now, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich’s American Solutions has launched a web-site providing tips on how individuals can help repeal Obamacare, including a petition advocating repeal.

Now that Congress has repealed Don’t Ask/Don’t Tell (DADT), seems that John McCain has changed his tune a bit, vowing to make repeal work:

Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) said Thursday he would work to help implement the repeal of the military’s “Don’t ask, don’t tell” policy, despite his opposition to that legislation.

McCain signaled he had made peace with the lame-duck bill to do away with the military’s ban on openly gay and lesbian service members, which he had sharply criticized.

“I think I have to do everything I can to make sure that the impact on the morale, retention, recruitment and battle effectiveness of the military is minimized as much as possible,” McCain said on Fox Business. “It is a law and I have to do whatever I can to help the men and women who are serving, particularly in combat, cope with this new situation. I will do everything I can to make it work.”

Well, maybe he hasn’t changed his tune, but has instead resigned himself to its passage.  And because of his high regard for the military, he realizes that for the sake of our armed forces, it must be made to work.

I have long been bullish on the man who is now Speaker of the House.  Perhaps, it’s that John Boehner and I grew up not far from one another, he in the working class Cincinnati suburb of Reading, I in the more affluent enclave Wyoming just west of the Republican leader’s hometown.

Cincinnati folk have always struck me as hard-working, decent Americans, largely respectful of their peers and generally treating people from different backgrounds with dignity.  It is no wonder that the city became a refuge for European Jews in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century and a center for Reform Judaism.  It was also an important way station for the Underground Railroad — and the location of the center honoring that path to freedom for many African Americans fleeing slavery.

Throughout his career, Boehner has embodied many of the qualities of his hometown, chief among them humility.  Indeed, in his commentary yesterday on the new Speaker’s “inaugural address” yesterday, Roger L. Simon singled him out for this quality:

In his speech today, John Boehner showed himself to be among the most impressive figures on our political landscape, and he did it by being that rarest of things in politics: a humble human being.

His opening ad-lib quieting thunderous applause – “It’s still just me” – should be an instructional moment in public behavior in our celebrity culture. Can you imagine Bill Clinton, Newt Gingrich, Barack Obama or even, alas, Sarah Palin saying such a thing with the authenticity Boehner clearly had at such a moment?

He spoke graciously for a brief twelve minutes – as compared with his predecessor Pelosi who spoke for thirteen before passing him the gavel. And unlike Pelosi, he spoke about us, the people, and very little about himself. (She spent the better part of the thirteen minutes listing her own accomplishments. But enough about Pelosi – let’s hope for a long time.) Boehner emphasized comity and civility, virtues the almost feel extinct in our society.

But, this isn’t the first time the Ohioan has shown humility upon achievement of an honor. When elected Speaker in November, he did not show the cockiness of the last Republican to succeed a Democrat in that office: (more…)

In 1984, the then-incumbent governor of New York’s father catapulted into the liberal limelight with his passionate speech denouncing Reaganism at the 1984 Democratic National Convention in New York.  Now, his son, the current incumbent delivers an address embracing the ideas the Gipper once promulgated on the national stage:

Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo called for “a fundamental realignment” of state government on Wednesday, saying New York needs to rethink the services it provides and face up to its overspending problem before it is too late.

“We need radical reform, we need a new approach, we need a new perspective,” said Mr. Cuomo, who was giving his first State of the State address. “And we need it now.” . . . .

The new governor mentioned the word “tax” or “taxes” 21 times, mostly to denounce them and promise to lower them. “What made New York the Empire State was not a large government complex,” he said. “It was a vibrant private sector that was creating great jobs in the state of New York.”

The proposals laid out by Mr. Cuomo — including reducing the number of agencies, authorities and departments by 20 percent and capping the annual growth of state government to the rate of inflation — set up a clash with the more liberal Democrats who control the State Assembly.

Kudos to the younger Cuomo for standing up to his party’s establishment and embracing the ideas which helped make his state great — and which animated the GOP (at least in its ideal form) for the past three decades.

Let’s hope he succeeds in his endeavors to reduce the size of his state’s government and increase the freedom of its entrepreneurs.

UPDATE:  This Cuomo guy is sounding a lot like his colleague across the Hudson:

In the past, notes E. J. McMahon, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute’s Empire Center for New York State Policy, governors who tried to cut the state’s health-care system were attacked with hard-hitting ads like one that portrayed a woman running down the street with a sick kid in her arms, only to find the emergency room locked. “‘Tell Governor Pataki not to kill Grandma,’” McMahon intones dryly. “And the ads work! Pataki caved after passing a few tough budgets.” Cuomo himself has described the process thusly: “The governor announces the budget; unions come together, put $10 million in a bank account, run television ads against the governor. The governor’s popularity drops; the governor’s knees weaken; the governor falls to one knee, collapses, makes a deal.”

Via Instapundit.  Doe hope Cuomo’s Democratic colleague in another big, blue state understand the game the unions play.

Welcome Instapundit Readers!  While here, you might enjoy my speculations about the New York Governor’s Reaganite rhetoric and the House Speaker’s potential for greatness.

Is my Congressman aware of the troubles small businesses are having setting up shop in Southern California — and the trouble those once-set-up shops have been having staying set up?  Is he aware of the vacant storefronts on the once bustling commercial thoroughfares that transect his district?

Now that Republicans have regained the majority in the House, Waxman has lost his perch as chairman of the Energy and Commerce Committee, giving him more time to return to Los Angeles and see the damage his policies (combined with those of overzealous California legislators) have wrought.

Under Waxman, Walter Olson writes, Waxman’s “committee was an unending source of ghastly new legislative proposals for regulatory manacles to be fastened on one or another sector of the economy , ideas that with any luck we may now be spared for the next two years.”  (Via Instapundit.)  And the regulatory manacles the California Democrat did succeed in fastening on the private sector have prevented entrepreneurs from keeping businesses open and creating new jobs.

Maybe if Mr. Waxman walked down Melrose, he might understand the real-world consequences of his policies.  He doesn’t even need return to Southern California to get a picture of what things are like in the overregulated regions he represents.  He could just google the unemployment figures for Los Angeles County.

Contrasting the speech then-Minority Leader John Boehner gave in 2007 introducing the then-new House Speaker Nancy Pelosi with the one Minority Leader Pelosi  gave today introducing Speaker Boehner, Byron York points out:

There were no laundry lists, no talking points.  Following that brief statement, Boehner went on to pay tribute to “the battle of ideas” that takes place in a democracy, and then he handed the gavel to Pelosi.  That was it.

Read the whole thing.  In the contrast to the brief speech the Republican gave, the former Speaker blathered on and on, offering a laundry list of Democratic accomplishments, on a day when Republicans were taking power in the House.  This was neither the time nor the place for Democratic grandstanding.

But, well, what can you expect from the current crop of Democrats.  Given Ms. Nancy’s behavior today, maybe we should retain our Pelosi Watch category, to keep an eye on this hyperpartisan who couldn’t even keep her caucus united in the vote for Speaker.  Nineteen Democrats . . .

. . . abandoned their party’s pick for speaker of the House, Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), a sign of their concerns about supporting the unpopular former speaker and of the difficulty she will have in marshaling her forces in legislative battles to come in the next two years. . . .

. . . the anti-Pelosi tally dwarfed the number of protest votes cast against leaders of both parties in the recent past, which never break into double digits.

Wonder how many of those 19 will be voting next week to repeal Obamacare.

Loved Michelle Malkin’s take on Nancy’s self-aggrandizing departure:

Pelosi won’t shut up: She’s breaking her arm patting herself on the back as 1st woman speaker, 1st Italian American speaker. Waves around kiddie human shields and cites litany of Nanny State “achievements” to spite GOP. Blathers about “fair prosperity.”

Update 2:00pm Eastern. She’s still going. Bitter clinger, clinging bitterly.

This is why we need someone with steel spine and no mercy.

Do hope House Republicans remember this spectacle in the coming months and treat Ms. Nancy accordingly.

FROM THE COMMENTS:  Seems our reader  V the K sees Ms. Nancy’s attempt to rain on the Republicans’ parade as a reminder just how she’ll behave in the minority and how they should react:

Republicans should realize that they are going to take the same amount of crap from the liberal media no matter how much or how little they cut; so they should GO BIG OR GO HOME!

Good advice.

As I write this, I am visiting my home town of Cincinnati, Ohio, not far from the birthplace of incoming Speaker John Boehner.  It seems that that Buckeye State native will be leading a relatively youthful Republican caucus compared to the increasingly geriatric gathering of outgoing Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

In honor of her departure, we will soon be retiring our category “Pelosi Watch.”  That San Francisco Democrat’s glory days are behind her and I predict she will end her career in the minority.  Seems the new ideas and the younger voices are with the new majority.  As Michael Barone reports, building on a piece in the Wall Street Journal:

Curious fact, unearthed by Gerald Seib of the Wall Street Journal. The average age of Republican House members in the new Congress convening today is 54.9, younger than the Republicans’ average age in the previous Congress, 56.5. But the average age of House Democrats has risen, from 58 to 60.2. That can be explained partly by the high turnover in the 2010 election. Many younger Democrats, first elected in 2006 or 2008, fell by the wayside. The old bulls from 65 percent-plus Democratic districts survived. Meanwhile, many young Republican challengers won.

But the results are historically anomalous. Going back to the Congress elected in 1950, there has never been more than a 2.8-year difference in the average age of House Republicans and House Democrats. The difference in this Congress is 5.3 years, almost double that.

Read the whole thing.

Perhaps because of his lifetime spent in politics, both as an elected official himself and as the son of one, once and current California Governor Jerry Brown has been focusing on the financial problems facing the government of the (once-)Golden State.  In his inaugural address, he made clear he intends to confront head-on the state’s enormous budget deficit.

He doesn’t, however, seem to have much of a plan to address the state’s private sector problem, those ubiquitous empty store fronts in Southern California and the growing number of citizens out of work.  It doesn’t seem to register to the Democrat that the state’s draconian environmental regulations — not to mention its high tax rate — drive jobs of the state, with many employers leaving the warmer coastal climes for the harsher weather inland.

And now, Stephen Moore reports today in the Wall Street Journal’s Political Diary (available by subscription), “Republican state legislatures and governors” are getting into the act, having are adopted “a new economic development strategy: Raid California for its jobs and businesses”:

At least three Republican governors have said as much in interviews. The idea is to offer lower taxes, a more business-friendly atmosphere and the right to be left alone from overzealous regulators. “We just keep inviting California businesses to look at the economic climate in Texas, where we treat businesses like assets not villains,” said Texas Governor Rick Perry.

California has some of the highest tax rates in the country, the worst bond rating and a multitude of nettlesome regulations. Chief Executive magazine just ranked California as the most antibusiness state in the nation. A new study by Joseph Vranich, a California-based business consultant, found that 144 major companies relocated plants, research facilities, headquarters or their entire operations out of California in 2010. That was more than triple the pace of job-creating firms leaving in 2009. Mr. Vranich said that the outmigration could become “a stampede” in 2011. “Business owners tell me every day that this is just not a hospitable place to do business anymore,” he said. (more…)

Just some healthy skepticism and a dose of sober reality, from reason.tv

-Nick (ColoradoPatriot, from TML)

Comes interesting news this week that an internal Democratic poll shows strong support for President Obama among gays, lesbians, bisexuals, and the transgendered. Of note, this poll was done before the repeal of DADT last month.

Some serious concerns about the interpretation of this poll. First of all, the poll was released only to the Huffington Post blog and only “on the condition that the full survey not be published.” Whenever a) the internals of a poll are not released and b) the results are sent only to a partisan publication for dissemination, it’s clear an agenda is being advanced by the numbers, that might not be borne out by the actual findings.

What’s more, in such an instance, plenty of questions arise: 64% either “approved” or “strongly approved”. So was that 10% “strongly” and 54% simply approving? Perhaps that’s splitting hairs, but it’s still significant. That the original results aren’t released suggests the depth of support might not be as impressive as its breadth. Another question: Where are these folks? There are no comparable approve/disapprove numbers from the same poll to indicate this demographic is any more supportive of Obama than the population (from which the respondents were separated as being “LGBT”) overall. Point being, poll gays and lesbians in San Francisco, you’ll likely find the same level of overwhelming support for Teh One as you would from that city’s overall population. Bottom line, this poll leaves many more questions than answers, if you’re willing to ask them.

But one great thing it does is offer up once again the opportunity to discuss the following thesis:

As more “gay” issues are settled by democratic means (as opposed to court mandates and decrees), and are therefore taken off the table, do you suppose gays and lesbians will begin to concern themselves with more important issues like the economy and national defense when it comes to picking their representatives? When HRC, Equality Matters and the slew of other left-wing advocacy groups don’t have things like DADT, ENDA, and marriage to flail about, do you think gays and lesbians will start to vote on more universal issues, and therefore gravitate more toward those who share American values of small government, low taxes, individual liberty, and a strong national defense?

To expand on the point to which Dan alludes directly below, the caricature of conservatives being ogres who simply hate gays and want to keep us all down and “would send us all to an island if they had their way” may be useful in this (and previous) day and age when some are still so animated about certain “rights”. But take away those “struggles”, and who would you vote for?

-Nick (ColoradoPatriot, from TML)

Perhaps the greatest misunderstanding we gay conservatives face is the media narrative that a dominant thread of modern conservative thought is hostility toward homosexuals while the principal plank of the Republican party is discrimination against gay people.  To be sure, there are elements of the conservative coalition antagonistic to gay people.  

Anyone familiar with the dominant strains of conservative thought, however, knows that criticism of homosexuality is largely tangential to the movement, if even relevant.  Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan, the two men credited with bringing conservatism into the mainstream, have even showed considerable sympathy for gay concerns and expressed opposition to anti-gay forces on the right.

Before the-then Governor of California came out against the truly anti-gay Proposition 6 in 1978, Ronald Reagan publicly expressed his opposition to this initiative which would have banned gay people from teaching in Golden State public schools.  (The Gipper’s public opposition shamed Jerry Brown into ending his silence on the issue.)  And that once (and current) Governor is concerned a hero among gays.

So, in the latest brouhaha over gays in the conservative movement, it comes as no surprise to us that most mainstream conservatives stand against those would exclude people like us from conservative conclaves.  John Hinderaker who writes at one of the leading conservative web-sites sums it up:

Recently, there has been controversy over this year’s CPAC, because certain social conservative groups have withdrawn from the event rather than share it with GOProud, a group of gay conservatives. Consistent with my general approach to these matters, my instinctive sympathies were with GOProud.

Commenting on a clip from MSNBC featuring GOProud’s Chris Barron, Hinderaker concludes, “If Barron speaks for GOProud, as I assume he does, they are a welcome and potentially powerful part of our conservative movement.”

And I know from personal experience that John means what he says.  I’ve gotten to know that good man (and his wonderful family) over the years.  While we don’t agree on all issues, he has listened to my arguments and welcomed me into his home.

His attitude is a sign of the welcome gay conservatives, like Chris Barron, like Bruce Carroll, like myself, have found on the right.  It would be nice if more in the media took note of our experiences.

FROM THE COMMENTS:  Lesbian NeoCon builds on my last sentence:

The media never will, because it doesn’t suit their flawed narrative. Gays are supposed to be some oppressed persecuted group of victims, that need liberalism to tell them how lucky they are to be victims. F that!!! 90% of my friends are conservative, and none of them have ever expressed any negative sentiment towards me, or my sexuality. They’re happy to see that I don’t subscribe to victimhood, but rather succeed in life through use of my own ingenuity and abilities. And that gays think liberals give a crap about them, is laughable. Lip service is the liberal game, and gays seem to fall for it every election cycle. Stuck on stupid.

This morning, a piece on GOProud’s web-site reminded me of something a reader told me our LA dinner last month.  Sarah Palin who loves to use Twitter and Facebook to comment on the events of the days was silent on an issue about which everyone was then buzzing:  repeal of Don’t Ask/Don’t Tell (DADT).

This silence doesn’t fit with the media image of a Palin as a socially conservative anti-gay demoness eager to keep gay people in the closets and lesbians at the loom.

Our good friends at GOProud report that the former Alaska Governor re-tweeted a Gay-Friendly, Anti-DADT Comment:

New York Magazine has this great post about a Twitter tweet sent by conservative radio talk show host and GOProud Advisory Council Chair Tammy Bruce.  Bruce’s comment was re-tweeted by former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin.

Read the whole thing.

For there to be a real change in the legislative landscape in 2011, Republicans elected to represent congressional districts or states in Washington must remember that they serve the people in those various jurisdictions and not the permanent denizens of the nation’s capital, a notion which many elected Republicans neglected in the past.

In her post on Republican investigations into Administration misconduct, Michelle Malkin reminds those Republicans of their duties:

Just a humble reminder: [Incoming House House Oversight Committee chairman Darrell] Issa’s job — and this goes for every GOP House leader — is not to mollify Beltway pundits.

Their job is not to manage White House p.r. and “reach across the aisle” and “get things done” for the sake of bipartisanship.

Their job is to protect taxpayers’ best interests, rein in a bloated, out-of-control federal government, and abide by their oaths of office.

Republicans need remember that Americans did not embrace the GOP this fall so much as they rejected the Democrats.  They gave us back our House majority on a kind of “trial basis.”  Should Republicans stand up to the Beltway establishment and for over-regulated individual and entrepreneur, they may well lose favor with the in-crowd in Washington, but retain the good will of the taxpaying folk beyond the Beltway for years to come.

New York Governor Andrew Cuomo may well be one of the luckiest men in politics.   The son of a politician well loved in Democratic circles, he was tapped as Bill Clinton’s Secretary of Housing and Urban Development with little experience to qualify him for the job.

Just as he waltzed into that job, he practically walked into his current job.  When the then-scandal plagued incumbent bowed out of the race, Cuomo’s path to the Democratic nomination was unobstructed.  The Republican nominee imploded almost from the moment he first opened his mouth after he won his party’s contest for the Empire State’s top job.  Not just that, the GOP is all but dead in New York State.

To win, he just needed to keep his name on the ballot.  Now in office, he seems to be as politically skillful as he was lucky.  Although his party is beholden to the public employee unions, he knows he needs to stand up to them if he’s to solve the state’s fiscal problems.  And  with word that he’s seeking “a one-year salary freeze for state workers as part of an emergency financial plan he will lay out in his State of the State address on Wednesday”, it’s look like he’s prepared to do just that:

“The governor said during his campaign that the difficult financial times call for shared sacrifice,” said a senior administration official, who requested anonymity because he was not authorized to speak publicly about the governor’s address. “A salary freeze is obviously a difficult thing for many government workers, but it’s necessary if the state is going to live within its means.”

While the immediate budget savings from the freeze would be relatively modest — between $200 million and $400 million against a projected deficit in excess of $9 billion — achieving it would be politically meaningful.

And because such a step would not require legislative approval, Mr. Cuomo could achieve it while bypassing the Assembly speaker, Sheldon Silver, and the Democratic-controlled State Assembly, labor’s most powerful allies in Albany. (more…)

Incoming House Majority Leader Eric Cantor will be introducing a bill to repeal Obamacare.

He’s doing this exactly as it should be done, using simple language (well, as simple as legislative language gets) for total repeal.  The bill is short enough that the average Congressman could in the time it takes to make a latte.

Indeed, I’ve already read the whole thing — which is something that most Congressmen who voted for the original bill probably can’t say.

When global warmists tell me about their climate ideology that governments must take action immediately to reduce the amount of greenhouse gasses pumped into the atmosphere (lest catastrophe ensue), I ask them to predict for me the annual increase in temperature over the next few years.

Should the temperatures increase as they predict (based on the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere), then I will join their crusade them in calling for government action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.  Unfortunately, they don’t dare to offer such predictions, saying that if we wait too long, it will be too late.

Well, as I learned last month, there are,  some “climate ‘scientists’ ” who have made predictions about global warming have have seen those predictions proven wrong (via Patterico).

Maybe their problem was that they were looking at the wrong data.  Instead of looking at the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere, they may have better served themselves by looking at other factors, including solar radiation.  A new paper finds no correlation temperature change and CO2:

The absence of correlation between temperature changes and the immense and variable volume of CO2 waste by fuel burning is explained by the weak power of additional carbon dioxide in the atmosphere to reduce the outcoming window of long wave radiation.

Via Pirate’s Cove.

With science increasing our skepticism, don’t you think it’s time to start rescinding some of the environmental laws designed to avert a crisis now apparently non-existent.  Repealing the most draconian of those laws in the (once)-Golden State may help the state regain its luster.

FROM THE COMMENTS: Sonicfrog reminds us that

2010 will not be the hottest year on record. As expected, due to the mid year fade of the El Nino and the establishment of La Nina conditions, temps took a late year nose dive and 2010 failed to beat the 1998 mark. As of this moment, average world temp is back to the decade average, meaning there is still no temp rise evident for at least a decade. As was 1998, 2010 temp was abnormal due to a strong El Nino. It wasn’t as strong as 98, but it was strong enough. I expect, if the ENSO / temp correlations hold to the usual pattern, the first few months of 2011 will be below average temp wise.

When, right after college, I lived in Europe, I noted was that the continentals were far more class conscious than their American peers. Unlike most of us New World natives, they pretty much saw the social structure as set in stone.  Perhaps, it is this lack of fluidity that caused so much resentment among the lower classes for their wealthier fellow citizens.  

Here, in America, many in the MSM seem to make much of income inequality, trumpeting statistics which show a rising gap between the rich and the poor.  Yet, most Americans just don’t get upset about that gap.  In his latest column, Michael Barone asks us to consider this “conundrum in American politics“:

Income inequality has been increasing, according to standard statistics. Yet most Americans do not seem very perturbed by it. . . .

It’s a widespread assumption in some affluent circles that ordinary Americans are seething with envy because they can’t afford to shop regularly at Neiman Marcus or Saks Fifth Avenue. My sense is that most Americans just don’t care. They’re reasonably happy with what they’ve got, and would like a little more.

It’s Barone, read the whole thing.  He make an important observation about American culture.  The best efforts of many liberals notwithstanding, most Americans don’t seethe with resentment for those more financially well-off than they.

Perhaps, it’s that we know, most of us at least, that greater financial success doesn’t necessarily mean greater personal fulfillment.  We believe those things can be found in our families, our communities and our passions.

Up until the George W. Bush era, if you were looking for a sensible left-of-center opinion, you went to the New Republic.  But, somehow the election of 2000 seems to have pushed their editors — and many of their leading writers — over the edge.

Jonathan Chait joined the angry left in proclaiming his hatred for George W. Bush.  And now another Jonathan who has, for some time, been showing similar signs of an affinity with the doctrinaire critics of anything conservative posts a piece titled in his magazine’s e-mail (and on the web-site, but not the article itself), Are There Any Grown-Ups in the GOP Who Can Talk Sense About the Debt? Any At All?

Now, maybe he didn’t give the article this title and the editors in promoting it did.  I mean, you click on that title on their web-page (or in the e-mail) and you get a piece with this title, “Lindsey Graham Joins the Loonies.”

And usually with Cohn, buried underneath his animus for small-government Republicans, are a few nuggets of wisdom.  But, it used to be that when the editors of the magazine did a better job in cleaning up their pieces in order to craft more civil critiques of conservatism.

Perhaps, it’s just the standards of the new media 0r the ethos of the left which has lead to the decline of this once great bastion of liberal thought.

2010, Bob Cusack reports at the Hill, “was the year of the Tea Party“:

. . . the Tea Party was in many ways a net asset for the GOP as Republicans grabbed control of the House and cut into the Democratic majority in the Senate. 

However, there was collateral damage as Rep. Mike Castle (R-Del.) and other Senate GOP hopefuls seen as the party’s best chance of winning general-election races were ousted in primaries. Some blamed Tea Party candidates for costing Republicans a Senate majority to go with their new majority in the House.

Now, the question will be whether 2011 becomes the year where the Republican House, consistent with Tea Party principles, rejects big-government programs and passes legislation repealing the statist initiatives passed in the 111th Congress while scaling back those federal programs which helped create the financial mess of 2008 and the ongoing economic downturn.

Let us hope that the powers that be in Washington, including some who held significant sway over Republicans like Castle, do not hold the influence they once did over elected Republicans.  And that instead Tea Party principles, nearly identical to those of a great man whose centennial we celebrate this year, guide those election officials.

2010 was indeed the year when the Tea Party helped transform the electoral landscape.  Maybe 2011 be the year when it transforms the legislative landscape. (more…)

Perhaps incoming California Governor Jerry Brown’s most effective ad in his successful fall campaign against Meg Whitman was the one where he used side-by-side clips of his Republican opponent saying the same things as the Republican incumbent.

People chose Brown because they wanted a change in Sacramento and believed Brown would be the least like outgoing Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger.  Yet, as he prepares to take office tomorrow, there are few signs that he will do things much differently than Charlie Crist’s leading California cheerleader.

The once and future Democratic governor is keeping many of the ostensible Republican’s people in place:

But the real news may be that as much as things are changing here, much will stay the same. It is not simply that this is Mr. Brown’s third term as governor, but that he will be confronting the same budget issues that have vexed California political leaders for more than a decade. . . . 

Despite the change in parties, few expect wholesale policy changes, since both men have fashioned themselves pragmatists. Arguably the most important cabinet position, the director of finance, is a holdover from the Schwarzenegger administration.

Now, this may well be a good thing, given that instead of focusing on personnel, Brown has been focusing on the budget.   That budget may show a commitment to responsible Administration.  But, we won’t know until we see it.

That said, personnel, as Reagnites well know, is policy.  And the type of people Brown taps will help set the tenor of his term.  That the state faces billion-dollar deficits (with no one really knowing the exact amount) and that Brown is keeping on the director of finance is not a good sign.

Well, while he did tie Whitman to Schwarenegger, he never said that he would be any different.  But, he did imply it. . .  Or did he?