September 2008

Assembled By John Lefebvre

Board of Directors Title Email Address

Jerry Cunningham Membership jlcham4@aol.com
Ellis Holcomb ellis@eande-enviro.com
Wanda Barnes Wandaleabarnes@aol.com
Jan Hurtt Co-Treasurer jansadvertising@msn.com
Larry Reynolds Membership larryreynolds.republicans@comcast.net
Linda Reynolds landlreynolds@comcast.net
John Lefebvre President john.lefebvre@comcast.net
Howard Zoufaly Zouhants@aol.com
Phil Mocon Secretary ph7ss@msn.com

Next meeting – September 12, 2008

August Meeting
We covered the waterfront for Referred measures and Initiatives that had been certified
by the Secretary of State’s Office.

MEETING TIME AND PLACE

We will be at Gander Mountain at 9:00 a.m. on the second Saturday of September 2008.

Gander Mountain
9923 Grant St.
Thornton, CO

Directions
Gander Mountain is a huge sporting goods store in the old Biggs, now Walmart Home
Depot shopping center just east of I-25 and south of 104th Ave. Just go in the front door
turn left on the first aisle and follow it down to the meeting room on the left.

This week we have several speakers that will address the remaining Initiatives that we
haven’t yet spoken about. Please come ready to share your opinions on these vital
matters.
I was so impressed with Sarah Palin’s speech it was easily the best speech of both
conventions. Jon Caldara this past week said he wants to have her baby. Many notable
people have echoed my own reflections that Sarah Palin has inspired me the most since
Ronald Reagan in 1980. Below please see the comments from Saturday’s Wall Street
Journal article by Peggy Noonan – a former speechwriter for Ronald Reagan.

Sarah Palin - A Servants Heart

September 6, 2008 12:49 a.m. EDT

DECLARATIONS
By PEGGY NOONAN

'A Servant's Heart'

September 6, 2008 12:49 a.m.; Page A11
Sarah Palin killed. And more than killed.

Much has been said about her speech, but a few points. "The difference between a hockey
mom and a pitbull? Lipstick" is pure American and goes straight into Bartlett's. This is
the authentic sound of the American mama, of every mother you know at school who
joins the board, reads the books, heads the committee, and gets the show on the road.
These women make large portions of America work.

She has the power of the normal. Hillary Clinton is grim, stentorian, was born to politics
and its connivances. Nancy Pelosi, another mother of five, often seems dazed and ad hoc.
But this state governor and mother of a big family is a woman in a good mood. There is
something so normal about her, so "You've met this person before and you like her," that
she broke through in a new way, as a character vividly herself, and vividly genuine.

***

Associated Press
Her flaws accentuated her virtues. Now and then this happens in politics, but it's rare. An
example: The very averageness of her voice, the not-wonderfulness of it, highlighted her
normality: most people don't have great voices. That normality in turn highlighted the
courage she showed in being there, on that stage for the first time in her life and under
trying circumstances. Her averageness accentuated her specialness. Her commonality
highlighted her uniqueness.

She seemed wholly different from, and in fact seemed a refutation to, all the men of
Washington at their great desks who make rules others have to live by but they don't have
to live by themselves, who mandate work rules from which they exempt Congress, for
instance. They don't live by the rules they espouse. She has lived her expressed values.
She said yes to a Down Syndrome child. This too is powerful.

***

What she did in terms of the campaign itself was important. No one has ever really laid a
glove on Obama before, not in this campaign and maybe not in his life. But Palin really
damaged him. She took him square on, fearlessly, by which I mean in part that she
showed no awkwardness connected to race, or racial history. A small town mayor is kind
of like a community organizer only you have actual responsibilities. He wrote two
memoirs but never authored a major bill. They've hauled the Styrofoam pillars back to
the Hollywood lot.

This was powerful coming from Baberaham Lincoln, as she's been called.

By the end, Democrats knew they had been dinged, and badly. After the speech they
descended on cable news en masse with the dart-eyed, moist-browed look of the
operative who doesn't believe his talking points. They seemed like they were thinking,
"I've seen this movie before and it doesn't end well." Actually they haven't seen it before
in that Palin is something new, but they have seen it before in terms of what she said.

Which gets me to the most important element of the speech, and that is the startlingness
of the content. It was not modern conservatism, or split the difference Conservative-ish-
ism. It was not a conservatism that assumes the America of 2008 is very different from
the America of 1980.

It was the old-time conservatism. Government is too big, Obama will "grow it", Congress
spends too much and he'll spend "more." It was for low taxes, for small business, for the
private sector, for less regulation, for governing with "a servant's heart"; it was pro-small
town values, and implicitly but strongly pro-life.

This was so old it seemed new, and startling. The speech was, in its way, a call so tender
it made grown-ups weep on the floor. The things she spoke of were the beating heart of
the old America. But as I watched I thought, I know where the people in that room are, I
know their heart, for it is my heart. But this election is a wild card, because America is a
wild card. It is not as it was in '80. I know where the Republican base is, but we do not
know where this country that never stops changing is.

***

It all left me wondering if this campaign is about to take on a new shape, with the old
time conservatism on one side, and a smoother, evolved form of the old style liberalism
on the other.

It doesn't get more dramatic, or dramatically drawn, than that.

***
I don't like the new media war. I don't like what it has the potential to do to the election,
and the country.

The media overstepped. The Republican party resented it. GOP strategists saw a unifying
force rising: anger in the base. They too had seen this movie before. They slammed the
media. The media shot back: "You're attacking us for doing our job!"

How did the media overstep? By offending people by going so immediately and so
personally into issues surrounding Mrs. Palin's family. They did not overstep by digging,
by deep reporting, by investigating Palin's professional record.

Campbell Brown of CNN did nothing wrong for instance in pressing a campaign
spokesman on Palin's foreign policy credentials. She was unjustly criticized for following
an appropriate and necessary line of inquiry. But endless front page stories connected to
Mrs. Palin's 17-year-old daughter? Cable news shows that had people insinuating Palin,
whom America had not yet even met, was a bad mother, and that used her daughter's
circumstances to examine Republican views on abstinence education? That was ugly.

In the end it made Palin the underdog, and gave her the perfect platform for the perfect
dive she made Wednesday night.

We have had these old press fights in the past – they were a source of constant tension
when I was a child, when Barry Goldwater came forward as a conservative and the press
scorned him as a flake, and later when Ronald Reagan came up and the press dismissed
him as Bonzo.

But this latest fight commences on a new and wilder battlefield. The old combatants were
old school gentlemen, Eric Sevareid and Walter Cronkite; the new combatants are half-
crazy cable anchors, the lower lurkers of the Internet, and the anonymous posters on the
comment thread on the radical website.

This new war on new turf is not good, and carries the potential of great harm. Everyone
really ought to stop, breathe deep, and think.

I am worried they won't. A friend IM'd the day after Palin's speech, and I told him of an
inexplicable sense of foreboding. He surprised me by saying he shared it. "Calling all
underworlds reporting for duty!," he wrote. "The bed is about to fly around the room, the
puke is about to come out." He meant: this campaign is going to engage unseen powers
and forces. He meant: this campaign, this beautiful golden thing with two admirable men
at the top and two admirable vice presidential candidates, is going to turn dark.

***

It is starting to look to me like a nation-defining election. And in this it seems almost old-
fashioned. 1992 for instance didn't seem or feel nation-defining, not as I remember it, nor
did 2000. 1964 did, and '80 did, but they both ended in landslides. Landslide is not what
I'm seeing here.
Where are the Democrats going to go? I suspect to foreign policy. In politics it used to be
called Tolstoy: war and peace. McCain-Palin will mean more war, Obama-Biden will
mean peace.

This campaign is about to become: epic.

***

John McCain also made a speech. It was flat.

***

URL for this article:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122059352189503479.html

Hyperlinks in this Article:

(1) http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122059352189503479.html
(2) http://online.wsj.com/opinion
(3) http://forums.wsj.com/viewtopic.php? t=3920

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• Amendment 53 -makes executives personally liable for corporate

fraud committed by employees

• Amendment 55 - bars employers from firing workers without

"just cause" -
• which is not defined

• Amendment 56 - requires businesses with 20 or more employees

to provide health care insurance

• Amendment 57 - allows injured workers, after collecting

workers comp, to "double dip" to sue for unlimited damages
including mental anguish

• Amendment 58 - eliminates a tax credit for severance (oil &

gas, mineral) tax payers and dedicates funds to higher
education; discourages energy exploration and development in
Colorado
• Amendment 59 - eliminates TABOR refunds forever; "Strike a
Better Balance" campaign is fighting this Push-back

• Amendment 46 - Prohibits the State from discriminating or

giving preferential treatment based on race, sex, color,
ethnicity, or national origin

• Amendment 47 - allows employees to opt-out of union membership

and prohibits unions from collecting mandatory dues

• Amendment 49 - Ethical Standards Now (Ask First)- stops

government from bundling money through public payroll and
delivering it to special lobbying interests (unions)

• Amendment 50 - Allows cities with gaming to set hours of

operation and raises betting limit from $5 to $100

• Amendment 54 - Clean Government Initiative - reforms

government contracting practices by closing the "Pay to Play"
loophole

• For information on more ballot issues see:

• http://ballotpedia.org/wiki/index.php/Colorado_2008_citizen_in
itiatives