GOP again in 2010?

"Republicans will come back" sooner rather than later, says John Andrews in the May round of Head On TV debates, and "2010 will be no fun for Democrats." Susan Barnes-Gelt taunts that the GOP may face permanent marginal status as "a minority, Southern party." John on the right, Susan on the left, also go at it this month over the RTD follies and the US war in Central Asia. Head On has been a daily feature on Colorado Public Television since 1997. Here are all five scripts for May: 1. NO NEED FOR REPUBLICANS TO REBRAND

Susan: It's painful to watch the Republican food fight as they engage - locally and nationally in a massive rebranding exercise. Currently R's are at risk of becoming a minority, southern party. The food fight is on with progressive realists battling the Limbaugh wing-nuts. We'll see if pragmatism trumps.

John: Susan, you’ll spoil your makeup with those crocodile tears. Keep your sympathy. Your so-called “progressive realists” are liberals who care little for the Republican freedom agenda. Their rebranding advice is unneeded. Republican appeal will increase as big-government Democrats overreach. The pendulum always swings.

Susan: Do you mean overreach defined by 8 years of the free-spending, war-mongering, Bill-of-Rights violating Bush/Cheney government? An agenda that's over-reaching on behalf of human rights, a solid economy, affordable healthcare, quality education, and a sustainable environment ain't bad!

John: Wow, first crocodile tears, now streets paved with gold. The Democratic dream machine is in high gear. But eventually dreams meet reality. Obama, not Bush, now owns the recession. And two wars. And Guantanamo. And the crippling deficit. Republicans will come back. 2010 will be no fun for Democrats.

2. POWELL ALL WET ON LIMBAUGH

John: What a joke for all these Obama cheerleaders to be telling the opposition party how to do a better job. Who can take that seriously? Colin Powell was AWOL on supporting McCain or running for President himself. He has zero credibility in recommending a comeback strategy. Gimme a break.

Susan: Dick Cheney misfired again when he endorsed Rush Limbaugh over Colin Powell as the future of the Republican party. Powell says Republicans needs to move toward the center, reaching out to growing black, Hispanic and Asian communities. Limbaugh articulates the opposite. Cheney has spent too much time in the bunker.

John: The future of the Republican Party isn’t any of those three guys, colorful and combative as they are. My side will start winning again when Obama’s European-style collectivism bogs down and people turn back to the GOP’s authentically American vision of freedom and opportunity. That day will come.

Susan: Ah the Grover Norquist approach - shrink government so small that it can be drowned in a bathtub. Fortunately a substantial number of Americans don't agree with you. Until the R's develop a positive agenda for the country - one that works for the haves and have-not's - Dems will dominate.

3. RITTER’S IFFY OUTLOOK FOR 2010

John: In 40 years of watching Colorado politics, Bill Ritter is the saddest puppy I’ve ever seen in the Governor’s office. Where’s the leadership? Where’s the accomplishment? He crashed the budget in spite of warnings. No wonder the polls show him with a disapproval rating of 49% to 41%.

Susan: Ritter is having a tough time getting his sea-legs in the Capitol's political swamp. He is naïve about how the game's played and poorly served by his senior staff. Term limits have dumbed down both sides of the aisle in the leg - making it even tougher for this governor.

John: Let the record show: Susan made no defense of her fellow Democrat when the Republicans opened fire. Ritter was an okay prosecutor. He should have stayed with that. Republicans have strong challengers in Sen. Josh Penry and Congressman Scott McInnis. This governor may be gone in one term, Jimmy Carter style.

Susan: Ritter will win a second term. McInnis lacks the fire, the finesse and the support of the conservative Republican base. At 32, Penry is too young, inexperienced and virtually unknown. Voters will stick with the devil they know, rather than gamble on the angel they don't.

4. HIGH STAKES IN AFGHANISTAN & PAKISTAN

Susan: Among the most challenging foreign policy dilemmas facing Obama's administration is the Afghani-Pakistan conflict. Leaders of both countries are weak, lacking the full confidence of their citizens. In recent meetings with US officials and Congress, neither demonstrated strong commitment to battle extremists threatening their countries - and ours.

John: Our inexperienced leftist president is learning that wishful thinking doesn’t win wars. It’s a good thing he went to his right in picking Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and in retaining Defense Secretary Robert Gates. Obama is pushing hard in Afghanistan with more troops and a new general. Go get’em, Mr. President.

Susan: The man you dismiss as leftist and inexperienced has made better, tougher calls during his first months in office than Bush-Cheney made in 8 years. Replacing General McKiernan with Lieutenant General McChrystal further signals Obama's new policies, more focused mission and enhanced strategic agility.

John: America still faces a war on terror. Barack’s inauguration didn’t change that. Yet this inexperienced leftist president, this apologizer, plays word games with “overseas contingency” and “man caused disaster” as if that makes it all better. At least he’s willing to fight the jihadists over there in Asia.

5. DENVER’S RTD ON WRONG TRACK?

Susan: With Cal Marsella bailing out as RTD's general manager (with a bloated diamond encrusted parachute), agency directors must get back on track. The new leader must be an experienced builder with vision, backbone and political skills. Otherwise they are on a train to nowhere.

John: RTD spending plans are bloated as well, yet absurdly they want yet another tax increase to build their ill-conceived trolley system. Why did the empire-building Marsella suddenly exit? Why have a parade of Democrat legislators quit? What do they know that we don’t? Has Colorado progressivism stopped progressing?

Susan: Unless the state's and the region's political leaders develop a vision and an agenda to keep this region moving - transit, highways, bike-lanes, buses and bikes - Colorado will choke on bad air and congestion. At every level - city, region and state - leaders had better step up.

John: Highways, yes. Bike lanes, come on. Buses, yes. Choo choo trains, enough already. RTD is Colorado’s fourth largest government, but one of its least accountable and poorest run. We don’t need more taxes for light rail. We do need competitive partisan elections for the RTC board. Marsella left in defeat.

Is this the best we can do?

Much is being made of the Dick Cheney vs. Barack Obama "debate" now going on in the media over national security. The Wall Street Journal has it on the front page today, after Cheney and Obama gave dueling speeches yesterday -- Obama from the rotunda of the National Archives and Cheney from the American Enterprise Institute. As has been his consistent message, Obama again reiterated his view that the Bush administration had "gone off course" in using enhanced interrogation techniques and off-shore prisons, saying that he is seeking to restore "the power of our most fundamental values". The former Vice President, meanwhile is having none of it. Calling the Bush policies "legal, essential, justified, successful and the right thing to do", he again took on the administration's critics by pointing out that "After the most lethal and devastating terrorist attack ever, seven and a half years without a repeat is not a record to be rebuked or scorned, much less criminalized. It is a record to be continued until the danger has passed."

This is an exceedingly vital debate. President Obama has made decisions on the basis of politics that I believe are putting our nation at risk. He caved to the left in precipitously deciding to close Guantanamo without any alternative plan; now it turns out that many of the most hated Bush policies -- using military tribunals and indefinite detention -- will continue. Why? Because more than half of the remaining Guantanamo detainees are too dangerous to try in court or to release back into the civilized world. But where will they go once Guantanamo is closed? No one has a clue, because nobody in Congress wants these lethal prisoners in their backyard. In the halls of Congress, NIMBY is the rule -- unless, of course, it's pork.

The problem for those who think that Obama is on a dangerous path, however, is that it is Dick Cheney leading the charge. Where is the spokesperson for the opposition to this president who isn't past his prime and considered a cross between an "angry white man" and Darth Vader?

We know, of course, that John McCain -- the Republican candidate for president just a short 6 months ago who got more than 44 million votes in the election -- is of little help on this issue, having campaigned himself against enhanced interrogation and for the closing of Guantanamo. So he's been -- by necessity and by temperament -- silent in this debate. But where are the others? Are there any conservatives who have a future (as opposed to a past) in politics willing and able to stand up and say to the nation what it already suspects? That Obama's inexperience and desire to "make everyone happy" is putting us at risk? That his world view -- and thus his emerging foreign policy -- is dangerously naive?

You have to give Obama credit -- he certainly likes to talk as if he is reasoned and balanced in his approach, that he has command of the vital issues that face us as a nation. He is nothing if not outwardly confident. But this president doesn't deal well with specifics and facts. He's long relied on soaring rhetoric that sounds great but says nothing. Like many liberals, he makes statements of opinion as if they are fact, saying it in such a way that it seems beyond dispute -- but offering no evidence to back it up. As the WSJ recounts in its lead editorial today: The President went out of his way to insist that its existence "likely created more terrorists around the world than it ever detained," albeit without offering any evidence, and that it "has weakened American security," again based only on assertion. What is a plain fact is that in the seven-plus years that Gitmo has been in operation the American homeland has not been attacked.

It is also a plain fact -- and one the President acknowledged -- that many of the detainees previously released, often under intense pressure from Mr. Obama's anti-antiterror allies, have returned to careers as Taliban commanders and al Qaeda "emirs." The New York Times reported yesterday on an undisclosed Pentagon report that no fewer than one in seven detainees released from Gitmo have returned to jihad.

Mr. Obama called all of this a "mess" that he had inherited, but in truth the mess is of his own haphazard design. He's the one who announced the end of Guantanamo without any plan for what to do with, or where to put, KSM and other killers. Now he's found that his erstwhile allies in Congress and Europe want nothing to do with them. Tell us again why Gitmo should be closed?

President Obama is making things up out of whole cloth and peddling them as fact; he is tremendously vulnerable on these issues, because what he says doesn't pass the simple smell test. Why is it Dick Cheney -- a man whose career is over -- shooting the arrows at the president and his party over this?

Is this really the best we can do?

Talk radio vs. thought police

(Denver Post, May 24) Memorial Day, honoring America’s war dead, originated in 1868 after the horrific bloodbath that saved the Union and freed the African race. From Sumter to Appomattox, half a million whites lost their lives so that 4 million blacks might have their liberty.What else was bought with all that blood? Freedom of thought and speech and assembly, for one thing. In defeating the slave power, Americans also defeated the thought police who had tried to criminalize black literacy and silence abolitionist voices. The First Amendment was reaffirmed with passage of the Civil War amendments.

Unfortunately the tyrannous impulse never dies. It must be constantly fought. There are always those who prefer censorship to debate. Sometimes they use labels. Criticize Obama and you’re a racist. Warn about illegal immigration and you’re a bigot. Sometimes they use laws. Diana DeGette muzzled free speech outside abortion clinics. Now the FCC has talk radio in its sights.

But this is not a policy piece about the Fairness Doctrine and all its sneaky surrogates, community content, minority ownership rules, the performance tax, or whatever else. Rather it’s a Memorial Day meditation on the attitudes and habits that keep a free society free.

First consider how “talk radio” became a sneer label in itself, when we should be cherishing it as today’s successor to the Committees of Correspondence from 1775. It’s a glorious thing, this unruly community of a host with his listeners, callers, guests, and sponsors, sounding off about what’s wrong and how to fix it. What a wimpout for liberals, uncompetitive in the medium, to deem it unfit company, infra dig.

Rush Limbaugh can settle his own score with Colin Powell; indeed the extra notoriety is money in the bank for El Rushbo. I’m more interested in local radio’s contribution to the open process of self-government here in Colorado. We’ve had one daily paper fold and another on the watch list. We’re getting the blue snow job from billionaires Tim Gill and George Soros. We need more ferment, not less, on the airwaves.

All Coloradans are better off when Peter Boyles of KHOW calls in the cavalry for that soldier with the impounded car, or when Mike Rosen of KOA champions that teen with the America-hating teacher. It’s good for the big, arrogant, impersonal institutions to get taken down a peg. (And if my show from the right on 710 and Jay Marvin’s from the left on 760 don’t often break news, we too enrich the free-speech mix.)

As for the attitudes that sustain a free society, Thomas Krannawitter of the Claremont Institute cites four indispensable ones. His checklist for citizens includes self-assertion to resist despotism, self-restraint for civil order, self-reliance to prevent dependency, and civic knowledge to unlock participation. I’ll argue the donnybrook that is talk radio stimulates all four.

“Your views count, you have a voice, you can make a difference, and if you don’t nobody will.” That’s our encouragement to the oft-ignored Jim and Jane Average from every broadcaster who sits down to the microphone, opens the phones, and dives into the issues. The packaging differs widely, from the combative Jon Caldara to the calming Dan Caplis, but the empowering message is consistent. Where’s the downside?

Unless you fear the messiness of democracy, there is none. Talk radio undeniably broadens civic knowledge. It fosters self-assertive, self-reliant individualism. Its moral fervor teaches self-restraint. Think of it as citizenship boot camp.

Web activism is potent, but talk radio with the spoken word and hearing ear in real time is even more so. Sen. Udall, Rep. Markey, Gov. Ritter, Mayor Hickenlooper, Benson of CU and Kiley of Coors may not return YOUR call, but when 850 the Blowtorch speaks, they listen. Politicos naturally want to turn down the volume. We shouldn’t let them.

05/17/2009: John Newkirk

7PM Guest: John Newkirk

05/17/2009: Michael Barone

6:30PM Guests: Michael Barone