2012 | Paul Edwards' Blog

George H.W. Bush’s Second Loss

I have never met any of the presidential candidates, personally. There’s no sense in putting hope in a single officeholder when mulling your vote for president.

As a constitutional conservative, what amazes me the most about our founding charter is the myriad of ways it intentionally prevents the three branches of government from absolutism.

You can have a genuine, articulate conservative in the White House, a horde of them on Capitol Hill, and a judiciary stocked with them – and government can still achieve very little.

Normally, we’d be mistaken to view government gridlock as a deficiency. It is a blessing.

Likewise, we have been warned of the dangers associated with political parties, by none other than George Washington himself. We have longed for leaders with character, courage and wisdom, and the two-party system has proved scarcely sufficient.

Yet, we could always assume to a reasonable degree that both parties would remain opposed to each other, squabbling over power, money and image, with brief flashes of cooperation on matters of vital national interest.

Needless to say, now is not the time for cooperation. But it’s also not the time for gridlock. Permit me to explain.

Gridlock is good until January 20, 2013. That’s the day we get our executive branch back. Government shutdowns, budget cuts and standstills on unconstitutional programs are just fine with me until then; people need to see how well they can function without the federal government.

But on January 21, 2013, cooperation is critical, and that means cooperation from the GOP-controlled House, and another electoral sweep that we cannot afford to lose – a GOP-controlled Senate.

And what are we to do with those two legislative bodies, where the leadership is still made up of establishment Republicans, assuming we keep the one and recapture the other? It is already clear that Speaker John Boehner and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell are no pair of crusading, constitutional right-wingers.

The House is more clear-cut; the Tea Party Caucus is of a formidable size that it can steer the debate. Assuming even more Tea Party-backed conservatives win seats in 2012, the House and a conservative president could bracket an establishment Senate into passing a lot of good legislation.

The Senate’s Tea Party contingent is small, consisting of old patriots like Jim DeMint, Michele Bachmann and James Inhofe, along with new blood like Marco Rubio, Rand Paul and Mike Lee. On the whole, however, the upper chamber is still loaded with RINO turncoats.

With President Hussein dethroned and the left back squarely in the minority, I can’t see much to look forward to, particularly if the Republican in the White House is Willard Mitt Romney.

Now for all of you Consensitive Mod Squad types out there, fear not: this is not a personal attack on Romney.

It’s a professional one.

To know the stock from which Romney comes is to understand why I describe a Romney nomination as George H.W. Bush’s second re-election loss.

Long before he enacted the first statewide socialist health care law in the union, Romney worked on his father’s failed 1964 primary campaign for the White House.

Then as now, the Romney moderate Republican brand battled against its conservative nemesis, represented by Barry Goldwater. John McCain-style party-bucking is a Romney family tradition.

Romney also has a little-known, but fully exploitable, history of having avoided the Vietnam War with student deferments. Although an honest media would not permit President Hussein – who never came close to signing up for duty in Grenada, Panama or Desert Storm – to criticize this shortage of military service, I wouldn’t be surprised if the White House tried to level the charge:

“He enacted universal health care and dodged Vietnam … why vote for a phony Bill Clinton when you can get the real deal in Barack Obama?”

With this background, it’s no surprise that Romney ran against Ted Kennedy in 1994 and for the governorship of Massachusetts in 2002 as a moderate, pro-choice Republican, and when elected, governed as a Democrat-lite.

To hear some tell it, Romney only served from 2003 to 2005; he spent nearly two-thirds of his final year in office traveling around the nation, fundraising and glad-handing. He’s an expert at getting people to part with their money – but to the end of electing him, so he can require them to part with even more of it through the force of law.

Mitt Romney would make a fine fundraising partner with Sarah Palin, who has also ducked the 2012 election. He could sweet-talk the Republican Party’s Consensitives, while Palin could court its conservatives.

But for the hour and the day, with the exceptions of Ron Paul, Gary Johnson and the laughable Jon Huntsman, Romney is the last person we should choose to defeat Hussein.

You see, we are approaching the end of Jimmy Carter’s second term. Carter was defeated for a host of reasons, but primary among them were prolonged recession, stagflation, inept foreign policy, weakness before our enemies, a bruising primary challenge from Kennedy and a third party candidate who peeled away Carter votes when everyone thought they’d be peeled from Ronald Reagan.

The Carter Years are back, and they are as unpalatable as ever. But nobody in the 1980 election thought that Bush, who lost to Reagan in the primary, had much to offer in the way of alternatives. It was not the time for a moderate Republican who would agree with half or more of what Carter said, and treat many of his asinine criticisms as valid.

I might argue that no stage of history really beckons a Bush 41 presidency, but especially not this one. So it is with Mitt Romney.

We need to be reminded that since 1960, the Republican Party has fielded only two genuine conservative candidates for the White House – Goldwater once, and Reagan twice. All of the others have been varying degrees of moderate – Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Bush 41, Bob Dole, George W. Bush and McCain.

Of those moderates, the only winners were Nixon and Bush 43, whose ardent national security stances during times of war made up for some terrible domestic and economic decisions.

Nixon squeaked into the presidency in 1968 by a vote split between the Southern Dixiecrats and the rest of the Democrat Party, while Bush lost the 2000 popular vote but won the electoral college.

It is, as Reagan famously said, a time for choosing.

If this opinion counts, let’s remind the GOP establishment – the ones who did survive the tidal wave of 2010 – that they were not spared because of how marvelously they get along with Democrats.

And please, for goodness’ sake, let’s nominate someone other than Willard Mitt Romney.

A front-runner with a discernible Negro dialect

It’s a classic Wesley Snipes punchline from the 1992 suspense thriller Passenger 57:

If you follow the Ever Red State Network fan page, you may have noticed that I use the phrase to compliment Herman Cain when he makes one of his pithy, well-placed comments: “Always bet on black.”

But let’s be honest: we loved his candidacy and his message, and sighed because we never thought he’d make it as far as he has.

I certainly did. That was why I liked Donald Trump’s brief flirtation with the race, because he was the only person polling high who could fearlessly stick it to President Hussein.

Now, we see the front-runner status diverging among three candidates. One of them is a clever career businessman with a master’s degree, a proud military record, the favor of the Tea Party, immunity from the race card (though it has been tried), and (perhaps best of all), dark skin and a discernible Negro dialect.

And he too speaks fearlessly in confronting the president.

Were they not such pigheaded fools protected by a compliant media, Harry Reid and Joe Biden could be taken to the woodshed for their blatant hypocrisy and bigotry by this measure alone.

Come to think of it, an awful lot of the media who protect Reid and Biden wondered aloud and in print whether President Hussein was “black enough” to relate to the issues and concerns of American blacks.

And now that the president has revealed that Obama couldn’t care less one way or the other, black leaders are hectoring his aides into uttering the word “black,” as though it has been made a byword in America.

You have to read all of this in context, bearing in mind that blacks have now held some of the highest government offices in the land, including the presidency, heads of the Justice and State departments, national security advisor, House majority whip, Supreme Court judgeships, leadership of the Republican National Committee and (in an irony of few equals) headship of the Democrat Party.

But in the political chaos of the Age of Obama, nothing turns the left’s narrative on its head like the emergence of a black front-runner, chosen from the Tea Party, with eloquence on par, yet boasting the meaningless genetic and hereditary elements liberals yearned for in their false god of 2008: slave blood, dark skin and a Negro dialect.

Now don’t get nervous. You know I have never been shy about race, mostly because I have plenty to answer for without God’s mercy and nothing to lose otherwise.

And you know I could care less about color, because you know that a person’s skin color is perceived by the eye rather than actually beheld – an image of light bouncing off of an object, refracted by the human eye into the opposite of what it actually is.

At least, you ought to know that. But you may have attended public schools, so we’ll go easy on you.

Wouldn’t it be the mockery of mockeries – in this, of all election years – to nominate Cain to run against the clean, articulate black man, the light-skinned one with no Negro dialect, unless he chose to have one? I can think of nothing more destructive to the left’s stranglehold on the black vote than a Cain presidency.

More importantly, Cain’s ascendancy would re-establish Reaganism at the helm of the Republican Party.

Whereas Mitt Romney would embody George H.W. Bush’s second term, and Rick Perry would do likewise as George W. Bush’s third – leaving us on shaky footing when it comes to defending or standing for what the GOP does – Cain’s election spells doom for establishment Republicans.

One would think, at this stage of the game, that the Consensitive Mod Squad would be laying as low in their opposition to Tea Party leadership as they do to Democrats. After all, didn’t they just lose a huge swath of their numbers in the 2010 primaries? Democrats running for re-election have more horse sense than these RINOs.

Cain has risen as a favorite of the Tea Party to begin with. He has no career record as a politician, but is instead the “citizen-legislator” (or in this case, “citizen-executive”) the Founding Fathers envisaged.

Cain has never stood for anything but Tea Party conservatism, to include low taxes (such as the 9-9-9 plan), opposition to socialized medicine, and border security (without tuition discounts for the children of illegals).

There’s still a long way to go before this is over. But let the record show that long before the Democrat Party ever got close to nominating a black man with a strong accent …

Scottstanzel Scott Brown

One of my favorite Rush Limbaugh parodies is called “Moderate Investment Services,” a parody of the Consensitive Mod Squad GOP.

Their slogan is, “Moderate Investment Services: Maybe we can help you … maybe we can’t.”

With that in mind, it’s good to be honest about the choices we face in Washington state. In the 2012 Senate race against Maria Cantwell, they’re looking “moderate.”

This is because everyone seems to be dodging the challenge to Cantwell.

Who can blame them? I wouldn’t want the job, given the slanted playing field. Dino Rossi took on Patty Murray last fall, which should have been a no-brainer. Washington turned over seats in its state House and Senate, and voted conservative on every tax initiative put before us.

We should be looking to add another conservative Republican to our federal Senate delegation next fall. Instead, it seems like all of those rowdy names from 2010 that so threatened the Ever Red State’s political establishment are sitting on their hands.

The only name in the Washington State Republican Party that seems to be sticking is Scott Stanzel, a former deputy press secretary for President George W. Bush.

It’s not my policy to attack a lone Republican willing to accept the task, if everyone else wants to go on assuming 2012 will yield the same results as 2010.

But this is not 2010. Let me explain why we could still win this.

After the 2010 midterms, when Murray squeaked by Rossi with a 51-49 win, I said that Democrats would continue to win statewide office in this state unless we cracked down on two of their key constituencies – illegal aliens and the Puget Sound Democrat machine.

Now there isn’t really any way to crack down on King County except with a decent Republican in the governor’s mansion, which cannot happen until the same time we are due to elect (or re-elect) our junior senator.

But there are some very encouraging signs about the illegal alien constituency.

For one thing, Arizona’s leadership in securing the southern border has caught like wildfire, with multiple other states moving aggressively to do the federal government’s job in enforcing the law and deporting the illegals.

Cracking down on illegal aliens is one of the most trans-partisan, unifying issues among the US electorate. States, counties and cities everywhere are joining the effort.

Since Olympia refuses to act, 13 of Washington’s 39 counties – a full one-third, to include agricultural Yakima and Lewis Counties – have signed on to the Secure Communities program.

Authorities in these counties can now share the identities of illegals they apprehend with Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and increase deportations. It is like a microcosm of Arizona, with Olympia playing the part of the Obama administration.

As a result, as I mentioned on the Knightly Show, fewer people with Social Security numbers are now seeking Washington licenses. That has to be an encouraging sign. Illegals, in greater numbers, are either laying low or getting out of Dodge.

Another factor is that King County does not single-handedly win statewide office for Democrats. By sheer numbers, King County represents less than a third of our state’s population; it is their voter registry, powered by their sanctuary cities and dead voter shenanigans, that have helped in the past.

But even with all of those factors, King County still needs all of the other west coast counties to join the fray to make eastern Washington an electoral redundancy.

This is why Rossi still came within three points of beating Christine Gregoire in 2008, while President Hussein gob-smacked John McCain by 17 points the very same night. Seven of the west coast’s 19 counties went to Rossi in 2008.

Anyway, this was supposed to be about Scott Stanzel.

Affable, media-savvy and well-connected, with the pre-existing resume enhancement of sponsoring Initiative 1098 to defeat the state income tax proposal of 2010, Stanzel is no political newcomer.

He appears to be a Bush Republican, deferring to the ruling class motif by defending Mitt Romney’s opinions on global warming:

“Romney can benefit by providing thoughtful, market-based solutions to climate and pollution issues. Most Americans won’t buy in to the hyperbole that comes from the fringes and is perpetuated by media histrionics.“

Stanzel preceded that commentary by pointing out that President Bush had also believed in “market-based solutions” to global warming … until 2007 when the Democrat Party took control of Congress, and Bush signed the now-infamous lightbulb efficiency act.

For a parallel here in Washington, Congressman Dave Reichert of the 8th District signed onto President Hussein’s “Cap and Trade” emissions bill when the Democrat-controlled House passed it in 2009.

So don’t look for principled conservative leadership from Stanzel; it isn’t there.

Stanzel has also jumped on the anti-Sarah Palin bandwagon, tweeting obnoxiously that she sounded like “athletes crying about the refs” when she complained about the media … which would be fine, except that the media are meant to act as the linesmen, not the refs. The PEOPLE are the refs when it comes to electoral politics.

It seems we have another Scott Brown on our hands.

Which is better than Maria Cantwell, but not by much.

Thanks to Brown and other Consensitive Mod Squad Republicans, we now have Dodd-Frank financial regulatory reform and the repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.

On the other hand, Brown did vote against ObamaCare and the DREAM Act.

So in conclusion, we aren’t much better off than we were before this blog began, but at least we’ve talked about our feelings.

I apologize that you probably feel like I do – among a group of women talking about their feelings while doing nothing about it – but remember, we’re dealing with moderates … maybe they can help us, maybe they can’t.

This Week’s Debate

Outstanding. United. Powerful. Unstoppable. And even the phonies were excellent!

You might not have thought so, but that’s why I’m here. I saw nothing but aerial bombardment on President Hussein and the Democrat Party like we’ve wanted since the mid-1990s.

And from the Republican Party, no less!

There was chitter-chatter on our side in the aftermath about Tim Pawlenty dodging the “ObamneyCare” comment. I could have cared less.

Ron Paul’s tin foil hat fell off on many of the questions he answered, and he sounded 20,000 times better than President Hussein. I loved every minute of it.

Then there was John “Queen” King from CNN running interference for the left by mumbling under their answers and continually interrupting them.

There were the obvious shortcomings of half of the cast – Pawlenty the Cap-and-Trader, Slick Willard and Newty-Newt.

But this ended up being more like a judicial panel that took one man to the mat like nobody’s business – and that one man was our nation’s arch-enemy: its current White House occupant.

In fact, the moment where I heard my voice the clearest came from Newty-Newt. King, misrepresenting Herman Cain’s discomfort at Muslims serving in his administration, painted his position as a strict “no-Muslims” stance.

Cain corrected him and said that it was to preempt the introduction of Sharia Law into the American justice system.

Moments later, Gingrich added:

“The Pakistani who immigrated to the U.S., became a citizen, built a car bomb which luckily failed to go off in Times Square, was asked by the federal judge, ‘How could he have done that when he … swore an oath to the United States?’ And he looked at the judge, and he said, ‘You’re my enemy. I lied.’ Now, I want to go out on a limb here … I am in favor of saying to people, if you’re not prepared to be loyal to the United States, you will not serve in my administration, period.”

Who won? Who cares?! We’ve been waiting a long time for this – an uninterrupted national broadcast without the filter of the liberal media distorting or failing to report what we actually believe.

And here’s something that dovetails nicely with this: the media, in the aftermath, didn’t like that the Republicans abstained from attacking each other, because they were having far too much fun slamming President Hussein.

Now think of all the work Big Journalism has thrown into promoting, campaigning, electing, inaugurating and defending this president:

their manufacture, branding and packaging of him as a messiah;

their trashing and obsessive smear campaign against Sarah Palin;

their absolute refusal to ask him any serious questions;

their dismissal, contempt and demagoguery of his political opponents;

their slavish defense of his policies, tactics and blatant hypocrisy;

and their skewed polling, bogus research and intentional misreporting.

After everything they tried, for four years (beginning in 2007), after risking their credibility, their ratings and (in many cases) their jobs – they have failed.

The American Right is alive, well, and humming like a well-oiled machine. And, as Michelle Bachmann said, “We are going to win in 2012. Barack Obama will be a one-term president.”

If there’s anyone more contemptible than President Hussein, it’s his cronies in the leftist media, and they have failed. Big time.

Cain shined. Bachmann was brilliant. Santorum rocked. Can you imagine if the next round also features Palin and Rick Perry?

Ladies and gentlemen, you know at the Ever Red State Network that we have our preferences as to who wins the nomination.

But don’t forget to take a breather in the midst of this great internecine war to celebrate. If someone – anyone – is pointing the finger at our accuser, our treacherous chief executive, lower your muzzle, pull up a chair, crack open a cold one and sing right along!

George H.W. Bush’s Second Loss

I have never met any of the presidential candidates, personally. There’s no sense in putting hope in a single officeholder when mulling your vote for president.

As a constitutional conservative, what amazes me the most about our founding charter is the myriad of ways it intentionally prevents the three branches of government from absolutism.

You can have a genuine, articulate conservative in the White House, a horde of them on Capitol Hill, and a judiciary stocked with them – and government can still achieve very little.

Normally, we’d be mistaken to view government gridlock as a deficiency. It is a blessing.

Likewise, we have been warned of the dangers associated with political parties, by none other than George Washington himself. We have longed for leaders with character, courage and wisdom, and the two-party system has proved scarcely sufficient.

Yet, we could always assume to a reasonable degree that both parties would remain opposed to each other, squabbling over power, money and image, with brief flashes of cooperation on matters of vital national interest.

Needless to say, now is not the time for cooperation. But it’s also not the time for gridlock. Permit me to explain.

Gridlock is good until January 20, 2013. That’s the day we get our executive branch back. Government shutdowns, budget cuts and standstills on unconstitutional programs are just fine with me until then; people need to see how well they can function without the federal government.

But on January 21, 2013, cooperation is critical, and that means cooperation from the GOP-controlled House, and another electoral sweep that we cannot afford to lose – a GOP-controlled Senate.

The House is more clear-cut; the Tea Party Caucus is of a formidable size that it can steer the debate. Assuming even more Tea Party-backed conservatives win seats in 2012, the House and a conservative president could bracket an establishment Senate into passing a lot of good legislation.

The Senate’s Tea Party contingent is small, consisting of old patriots like Jim DeMint, Michele Bachmann and James Inhofe, along with new blood like Marco Rubio, Rand Paul and Mike Lee. On the whole, however, the upper chamber is still loaded with RINO turncoats.

With President Hussein dethroned and the left back squarely in the minority, I can’t see much to look forward to, particularly if the Republican in the White House is Willard Mitt Romney.

Now for all of you Consensitive Mod Squad types out there, fear not: this is not a personal attack on Romney.

It’s a professional one.

To know the stock from which Romney comes is to understand why I describe a Romney nomination as George H.W. Bush’s second re-election loss.

Long before he enacted the first statewide socialist health care law in the union, Romney worked on his father’s failed 1964 primary campaign for the White House.

Then as now, the Romney moderate Republican brand battled against its conservative nemesis, represented by Barry Goldwater. John McCain-style party-bucking is a Romney family tradition.

“He enacted universal health care and dodged Vietnam … why vote for a phony Bill Clinton when you can get the real deal in Barack Obama?”

With this background, it’s no surprise that Romney ran against Ted Kennedy in 1994 and for the governorship of Massachusetts in 2002 as a moderate, pro-choice Republican, and when elected, governed as a Democrat-lite.

Mitt Romney would make a fine fundraising partner with Sarah Palin, who has also ducked the 2012 election. He could sweet-talk the Republican Party’s Consensitives, while Palin could court its conservatives.

But for the hour and the day, with the exceptions of Ron Paul, Gary Johnson and the laughable Jon Huntsman, Romney is the last person we should choose to defeat Hussein.

I might argue that no stage of history really beckons a Bush 41 presidency, but especially not this one. So it is with Mitt Romney.

Of those moderates, the only winners were Nixon and Bush 43, whose ardent national security stances during times of war made up for some terrible domestic and economic decisions.

Nixon squeaked into the presidency in 1968 by a vote split between the Southern Dixiecrats and the rest of the Democrat Party, while Bush lost the 2000 popular vote but won the electoral college.

It is, as Reagan famously said, a time for choosing.

If this opinion counts, let’s remind the GOP establishment – the ones who did survive the tidal wave of 2010 – that they were not spared because of how marvelously they get along with Democrats.

And please, for goodness’ sake, let’s nominate someone other than Willard Mitt Romney.

A front-runner with a discernible Negro dialect

It’s a classic Wesley Snipes punchline from the 1992 suspense thriller Passenger 57:

If you follow the Ever Red State Network fan page, you may have noticed that I use the phrase to compliment Herman Cain when he makes one of his pithy, well-placed comments: “Always bet on black.”

But let’s be honest: we loved his candidacy and his message, and sighed because we never thought he’d make it as far as he has.

I certainly did. That was why I liked Donald Trump’s brief flirtation with the race, because he was the only person polling high who could fearlessly stick it to President Hussein.

And he too speaks fearlessly in confronting the president.

Were they not such pigheaded fools protected by a compliant media, Harry Reid and Joe Biden could be taken to the woodshed for their blatant hypocrisy and bigotry by this measure alone.

Come to think of it, an awful lot of the media who protect Reid and Biden wondered aloud and in print whether President Hussein was “black enough” to relate to the issues and concerns of American blacks.

And now that the president has revealed that Obama couldn’t care less one way or the other, black leaders are hectoring his aides into uttering the word “black,” as though it has been made a byword in America.

Now don’t get nervous. You know I have never been shy about race, mostly because I have plenty to answer for without God’s mercy and nothing to lose otherwise.

And you know I could care less about color, because you know that a person’s skin color is perceived by the eye rather than actually beheld – an image of light bouncing off of an object, refracted by the human eye into the opposite of what it actually is.

At least, you ought to know that. But you may have attended public schools, so we’ll go easy on you.

More importantly, Cain’s ascendancy would re-establish Reaganism at the helm of the Republican Party.

Whereas Mitt Romney would embody George H.W. Bush’s second term, and Rick Perry would do likewise as George W. Bush’s third – leaving us on shaky footing when it comes to defending or standing for what the GOP does – Cain’s election spells doom for establishment Republicans.

Cain has risen as a favorite of the Tea Party to begin with. He has no career record as a politician, but is instead the “citizen-legislator” (or in this case, “citizen-executive”) the Founding Fathers envisaged.

Cain has never stood for anything but Tea Party conservatism, to include low taxes (such as the 9-9-9 plan), opposition to socialized medicine, and border security (without tuition discounts for the children of illegals).

There’s still a long way to go before this is over. But let the record show that long before the Democrat Party ever got close to nominating a black man with a strong accent …

Scottstanzel Scott Brown

One of my favorite Rush Limbaugh parodies is called “Moderate Investment Services,” a parody of the Consensitive Mod Squad GOP.

Their slogan is, “Moderate Investment Services: Maybe we can help you … maybe we can’t.”

With that in mind, it’s good to be honest about the choices we face in Washington state. In the 2012 Senate race against Maria Cantwell, they’re looking “moderate.”

This is because everyone seems to be dodging the challenge to Cantwell.

Who can blame them? I wouldn’t want the job, given the slanted playing field. Dino Rossi took on Patty Murray last fall, which should have been a no-brainer. Washington turned over seats in its state House and Senate, and voted conservative on every tax initiative put before us.

We should be looking to add another conservative Republican to our federal Senate delegation next fall. Instead, it seems like all of those rowdy names from 2010 that so threatened the Ever Red State’s political establishment are sitting on their hands.

The only name in the Washington State Republican Party that seems to be sticking is Scott Stanzel, a former deputy press secretary for President George W. Bush.

It’s not my policy to attack a lone Republican willing to accept the task, if everyone else wants to go on assuming 2012 will yield the same results as 2010.

But this is not 2010. Let me explain why we could still win this.

After the 2010 midterms, when Murray squeaked by Rossi with a 51-49 win, I said that Democrats would continue to win statewide office in this state unless we cracked down on two of their key constituencies – illegal aliens and the Puget Sound Democrat machine.

Now there isn’t really any way to crack down on King County except with a decent Republican in the governor’s mansion, which cannot happen until the same time we are due to elect (or re-elect) our junior senator.

But there are some very encouraging signs about the illegal alien constituency.

For one thing, Arizona’s leadership in securing the southern border has caught like wildfire, with multiple other states moving aggressively to do the federal government’s job in enforcing the law and deporting the illegals.

Cracking down on illegal aliens is one of the most trans-partisan, unifying issues among the US electorate. States, counties and cities everywhere are joining the effort.

Since Olympia refuses to act, 13 of Washington’s 39 counties – a full one-third, to include agricultural Yakima and Lewis Counties – have signed on to the Secure Communities program.

Authorities in these counties can now share the identities of illegals they apprehend with Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and increase deportations. It is like a microcosm of Arizona, with Olympia playing the part of the Obama administration.

As a result, as I mentioned on the Knightly Show, fewer people with Social Security numbers are now seeking Washington licenses. That has to be an encouraging sign. Illegals, in greater numbers, are either laying low or getting out of Dodge.

But even with all of those factors, King County still needs all of the other west coast counties to join the fray to make eastern Washington an electoral redundancy.

This is why Rossi still came within three points of beating Christine Gregoire in 2008, while President Hussein gob-smacked John McCain by 17 points the very same night. Seven of the west coast’s 19 counties went to Rossi in 2008.

Anyway, this was supposed to be about Scott Stanzel.

Affable, media-savvy and well-connected, with the pre-existing resume enhancement of sponsoring Initiative 1098 to defeat the state income tax proposal of 2010, Stanzel is no political newcomer.

He appears to be a Bush Republican, deferring to the ruling class motif by defending Mitt Romney’s opinions on global warming:

“Romney can benefit by providing thoughtful, market-based solutions to climate and pollution issues. Most Americans won’t buy in to the hyperbole that comes from the fringes and is perpetuated by media histrionics.“

Stanzel preceded that commentary by pointing out that President Bush had also believed in “market-based solutions” to global warming … until 2007 when the Democrat Party took control of Congress, and Bush signed the now-infamous lightbulb efficiency act.

For a parallel here in Washington, Congressman Dave Reichert of the 8th District signed onto President Hussein’s “Cap and Trade” emissions bill when the Democrat-controlled House passed it in 2009.

So don’t look for principled conservative leadership from Stanzel; it isn’t there.

It seems we have another Scott Brown on our hands.

Which is better than Maria Cantwell, but not by much.

Thanks to Brown and other Consensitive Mod Squad Republicans, we now have Dodd-Frank financial regulatory reform and the repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.

On the other hand, Brown did vote against ObamaCare and the DREAM Act.

So in conclusion, we aren’t much better off than we were before this blog began, but at least we’ve talked about our feelings.

I apologize that you probably feel like I do – among a group of women talking about their feelings while doing nothing about it – but remember, we’re dealing with moderates … maybe they can help us, maybe they can’t.