Be Wery, Wery Qwiet, They’re Hunting WRINOs

By Kleinheider Posted on December 10, 2008 at 6:13 pm

UPDATE: Rep. Bill Dunn states in the comments that he is not a member of any group of the type described below and Rep. Brian Kelsey has posted on the original article the following:

This is Rep. Brian Kelsey (R-Germantown). The statement that I am a member of any so-called “RINO Hunters” group is 100% false. Please remove my name from this posting immediately. I don’t have anything to do with this group (if it even exists) and haven’t been contacted even once by anybody who does.

A group of Tennessee conservatives are reportedly getting together to pool their money in the pursuit of taking down a few moderates:

The group is attempting to find 15 founding donors good for $20,000 each for each election cycle ($10,000 annual) and other donors to achieve a $375,000 annual budget. The acting chair of the group is Steve Gill, a Nashville radio talk show host. The group also includes major Republican Party donors like Lee Beaman, A.J. McCall, Jimmy Wallace, and James Peach. Legislative members include Republican state Reps. Bill Dunn, Frank Niceley, Brian Kelsey, Donna Rowland, Glen Casada, and Bill Ketron, among others.

The group has a list of 18 conservative positions having to do with opposition to a state income tax, Second Amendment protections, pro-life, traditional marriage, pro-business, repeal of the Hall Income Tax, strict border enforcement, and pro-drilling for energy independence.

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Tags: Bill Dunn, Brian Kelsey, Conservatives, Frank Niceley, Jimmy Wallace, moderates, RINOS, Steve Gill  

If It Slides, It Slides

By Kleinheider Posted on December 4, 2008 at 6:31 pm

Ed Kilgore suggests that some Republican may not mind an economic downturn:

While I am quite sure that Republicans are not about to hoist banners reading “Deflation Now!” a look back at the conflicts over the first “bailout” package and some of the GOP rhetoric surrounding the presidential campaign should make it clear that there is in fact a strong undercurrent of conservative hostility to any sort of relief measures that don’t simply involve tax cuts or deregulation. Those who convinced themselves that the mortgage crisis was caused by ACORN and poor and minority borrowers certainly are in no hurry to succor such Obama-supporting miscreants. More generally, there’s always been a large faction of conservatives who favored the occasional “healthy” recession to wring “excess demand” out of the economy. One of the innovations associated with the GOP’s embrace of supply-side economics was a partial abandonment of that point of view as “root canal” or “Hooverism.” But in the face of an actual recession, like the one St. Ronald Reagan presided over in 1981-83, there was no notable conservative support for any economic stimulus that didn’t focus on high-end or corporate tax cuts.

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Tags: Conservatives, depression, recesssion, Republicans  

Shrugging Off The Violence Inherent In The System

By Kleinheider Posted on May 8, 2008 at 6:59 am

A study from the National Science Foundation reveals that those with right-wing ideological predisoposition tend to be a happier lot:

If your beliefs don’t justify gaps in status, you could be left frustrated and disheartened, according to the researchers, Jaime Napier and John Jost of New York University. They conducted a U.S.-centric survey and a more internationally focused one to arrive at the findings.

“Our research suggests that inequality takes a greater psychological toll on liberals than on conservatives,” the researchers write in the June issue of the journal Psychological Science, “apparently because liberals lack ideological rationalizations that would help them frame inequality in a positive (or at least neutral) light.”

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Tags: Conservatives, contentment, happiness, help help I'm being oppressed, liberals, satisfaction