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The Stench of Impropriety: Your Tax Dollars, Your Body Image, and The Government (Part 2 of 2)

Steve Scheffler: It’s Time To Replace Steele

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Steve SchefflerSteve Scheffler is Iowa's National Committeeman to the Republican National Committee and serves along with Kim Lehman, Iowa's National Committeewoman, in representing Iowa Republicans on the National Committee. Steve provided the following update regarding his thoughts about the upcoming RNC Chair election about a week and a half ago. I had hoped to get it posted earlier, but the holidays have been too enjoyable to focus on other things.

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As your Republican National Committeeman for Iowa, I wanted to give you an update on the race for Chairman of the Republican National Committee. The election will be held on January 14, 2011 and we will be electing a chairman for a 2-year term. I had the privilege of attending a candidate forum on December 1st and then also a candidate interview process on December 2nd. All the announced or potential candidates for chairman appeared at the interview session except for the current chairman, Michael Steele. Each candidate was given an ample period of time to make their case to be the chairman. Each of these individual interview sessions was followed by a 30 minute Q & A time. The candidates who [...]
The Stench of Impropriety: Your Tax Dollars, Your Body Image, and The Government (Part 2 of 2)

OppurtuniTEA to RealiTEA

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In a lot of ways you wouldn't need much of a crystal ball to see this coming: A Country over 13 trillion dollars in debt with a government either completely ineffectual or damaging in nearly all spheres except military, enacting massive expenditures passed against the majority opinion of its citizens, which gives rise to a movement that wants to stop spending money it doesn't have and return their government to its Constitutionally relegated space. These people have been branded with a name: the Tea Party, which is weird because I have never been to a party where everyone is this mad. Much has been said about this newly minted surge and much is known. Though you may not have needed it to see it coming, that crystal ball sure could come in handy when trying to envision how the Tea Party will attempt to pivot from being a movement to achieving movement. Being that mine seems to be broken about half the time I'll just tell you that if I could write the script it would look something like this. Never minding how sad it is a movement is needed for this, the beauty of this uprising is the underlying confidence that is implied by the movement. The confidence of the people in saying we can take care of ourselves. We, as Americans, can make decisions on a personal level to better ourselves and our Country while weathering the results. Let us keep the vast majority of our own money and we will be the stewards of our own future. The next step is to have the fortitude to extend this confidence into the political proposals that will be forthcoming after the mid-term elections, when at a minimum Republicans will control the House, if not the Senate as well. Here is what I mean by this-- the process for passing legislation in Washington is to argue for it by making grand proclamations for how some bill's passage will control costs, provide this or that, or stop this or that. Once passed the game turns into one of managing expectations. When a bill is written never is there included benchmarks that need to be met for it to be continued, no rip-cord provisions stating that if certain measurable effects that have been promised do not materialize in a certain amount of time the bill is nullified or re-opened for debate. The reasons for this are obvious. First, when you pass bills upwards of 1,500 pages for a country of over 350 million people nobody knows what will really happen. Second, it flies in the face of political self-preservation by opening the door to, god forbid, being proven wrong. A perfect example of this is [...]
The Stench of Impropriety: Your Tax Dollars, Your Body Image, and The Government (Part 2 of 2)

Hitting A Moving Target

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So it is said that if you know your enemies and know yourself, you can win a hundred battles without a single loss.

—Sun Tzu, The Art of War

The two major forms of Republicanism each have a doctrine that is tied to actual documents. Religious social conservatives have The Bible, while fiscal and Constitutional conservatives have the Constitution. It is safe to say that the vast majority of Republicans have their political tenants supplied by one, if not both, of these documents. This type of textual anchor is a positive philosophically and morally but in a strictly political sense can be a liability. The resulting positives are what tend to be deep, time-tested convictions, stability, certainty and, when used, an effective measuring stick for candidates in primaries. However, in our current event driven and largely politically uninformed society the negative is that this rigidness makes it nearly impossible to adapt positions to individual situations and use current events for maximum political gain. This is a problem that the modern day liberal Democrat will not have anytime soon. They indeed stand in the starkest of contrast. Having left the Constitution behind decades ago, they move forward with no defined doctrine. No set of black and white documents that create, inform, or guide their ideology (and don’t even try to give me the party platform). This creates a situation in which changing party leadership sets an evolving standard as to what defines a Democrat. This not only allows them to easily tailor their political message to what they perceive to be popular at the moment, but grants them the option of playing the role of “lifeguard” and coming to the citizenry's rescue with politically crafted legislation. This, in tandem with the current perception that this is indeed the role of government, is extremely effective but thankfully also comes with disadvantages. First, the [...]
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