PUBLIC MARKS from jasontromm with tag conservative

A radical activist on a mission to "out" conservative homosexual lawmakers and Capitol Hill staffers held on to information about Rep. Mark Foley's relationships with underage male pages, suggesting the story would break at the time of mid-term elections. Blogger Jim Hoft of Gateway Pundit points to a campaign by two activists who had Foley on their "target list" of 20 people and shared the information with the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. ()() This seems to be the smoking gun that proves the Democratic leadership knew about Foley for months and did nothing about it.

Right now John McCain is the front-runner for the 2008 GOP presidential nomination. But everyone expects that a single major competitor will emerge to challenge him from the right. The question hung in the air of this past weekend's Family Research Council summit in Washington: Who will that candidate be for the GOP's powerful social conservative base?

When Judge Anna Diggs Taylor was given the job of deciding whether the Bush administration’s wiretapping program was unconstitutional, she certainly understood that she would be ruling on one of the most politically charged cases in recent history. So it would have been prudent for her to disclose any activity that might conceivably raise questions about her ability to be impartial. Regrettably, it was left to a conservative group, Judicial Watch, to point out her role as a trustee to a foundation that had given grants to a branch of the American Civil Liberties Union, a plaintiff in the case.

A group of Baptist leaders called on its members Friday to "speak positively about public education" in response to a conservative movement to pull Baptist children out of public schools. Fifty-six pastors and organizational leaders - some from the conservative Southern Baptist Convention and others from the more moderate Cooperative Baptist Fellowship - signed a letter supporting public schools.

It seems that Medicare and Medicaid consider it fraud if a physician charges any patient less than the government must pay for a medical service. If a doctor feels compassion for some poor soul and offers a discount, he must grant that “discount” for every billing for every patient in the government programs. If he forgives one indigent from paying at all, the government never has to pay for any such procedure. ()() Is this insane or what? Doctors want to do good works, but Medicare/Medicaid rules prevent them from giving out free services. Crazy!

Supporters of the abortion movement have deceived mankind with bumfuzzling statements that Partial Birth Abortion is a rare occurrence, being performed "less than 500 times a year on only fetuses that are severely deformed." However, as early as November 1995, Ron Fitzsimmons, then executive director of the National Coalition of Abortion Providers, admitted on ABC's Nightline that he lied when he asserted the procedure was used rarely and only on fetuses and women whose lives were in danger. At that time, Fitzsimmons estimated 5,000 Partial Birth Abortions were performed annually and "primarily done on healthy women of healthy fetuses."

With three federal appellate courts now ruling the Partial Birth Abortion Ban Act of 2004 unconstitutional, the issue likely will be decided by the newly configured Supreme Court, with two conservative justices recently appointed by President Bush.

But reporters still ignore free market advocates who predicted it. Media coverage of problems facing the new Medicare prescription drug plan focused on elderly patients left in the lurch by bureaucracy, producing what CBS’s Bill Plante called a “political headache” for the Bush administration. But in the Jan. 16 reports on the “Evening News” and “World News Tonight,” both networks ignored conservative critics who had argued the plan was doomed to fail because it was a typical big government solution that ignored the free market.

You heard it here first: Ted Kennedy, the Democrat Party mascot, is a tone-deaf alien from a distant galaxy. How else to explain his impudent inquisition into the integrity of our nation's next Supreme Court justice, the Honorable Samuel Alito? In Senate Judiciary Committee hearings this week, Kennedy actually asserted that the nominee's association with a conservative Princeton alumni group two decades ago should disqualify him from a seat on the High Court.

Ranked by the editors of Human Events. (Republicans In Name Only)

Most debate about Supreme Court nominee Samuel Alito has focused on his propensity to vote to overrule Roe v. Wade and the similarity between him and conservative Justice Antonin Scalia. But despite the superficial parallels between the two conservative, Italian-American Catholic jurists, it is important to recognize that Alito has a substantial libertarian dimension to his jurisprudence as well as a conservative one. In several key fields of law, he is more likely than Scalia and other conservatives to be skeptical of assertions of government power. More important, there is much in his record that should appeal to libertarians and -- to a lesser extent -- even left-wing liberals.

I hate it when I am sympathetic to arguments on both sides of an issue as it threatens my image as a benevolently close-minded, dogmatic, doctrinaire ideologue.