I’ve told this story a few times, but I will tell it again: In November of 1996, I fell ill. It started as a flu which became pnuemonia and then a massive infection. The end result was that I was in the hospital for two weeks as they tried to get the infection under control. At the time, I didn’t have health insurance. I was 27 and working for a coffee chain that did provide health care, but when you are working for 6 bucks an hour, paying what seemed to be a large amount for health...

This is the second in a series of articles on New Majority.com by Geoffrey Kabaservice on this history of moderates in the Republican Party. He focuses on Thomas Dewey, the former Governor of New York and the GOP candidate for President in 1944 and 1948. Here is an excerpt: Unlike the stalwarts who continued to dominate what little remained of the Republican representation in Congress in the ‘30s and early ‘40s, Dewey believed that the Depression had permanently reshaped the political landscape...

Note: This is an interview I did back in November and is also found on my blog, NeoMugwump. A few weeks ago, I got an invite to join a group on Facebook called Progressive Republicans. The group was described as “…Republicans interested in social justice, civil rights and a clean environment as well as a small government and strong national defense.” I was curious about it and the person behind the group. A few days ago, I decided to see if I could interview the person behind...

Members of the Republican National Committee elected their first-ever African-American party chief on Friday, choosing former Maryland Lt. Gov. Michael Steele to chair the organization after six rounds of tumultuous balloting. More from CNN.

The Stimulus Bill passed the House, but without a single Republican vote. Liberals are screaming bloody murder and talking about how the GOP doesn’t care about the American people. Myself, I’m of two minds of the package. On the one hand, the federal government does have to act in some way. The old policy of trying to deal with monetary policy hasn’t worked and neither has the so-called bailout of the financial sector. I do think some spending has to be done by the feds, but...

God Bless, David Frum. I’ve always appreciated Frum, even if I don’t always agree with him. He has always been an open-minded sort of fellow, a thoughtful conservative. (Plus, as a native Michigander who lived an hour from the Canadian border, I loved watching his mother, Barbara Frum on the Canadian Broadcasting newsprogram, the Journal.) Frum has an introductory post on his website, NewMajority.com where he introduces a series of articles highlighting the forgotten history of moderates...

Former GOP Congressman Mickey Edwards has written a piece about how Ronald Reagan would not recognize the current Republican Party. Now there is much to agree with in his essay, but at some point, this is all tiring. I mean, haven’t we been hearing about how the GOP isn’t what it used to be for quite some time? Goldwater-style Republicans, libertarians, people like me who tend to be more Rockefeller Republicans all whine and moan about the current state of the party and there is much...

Someone in the Obama Administration has to be thinking this was just bad timing: The emergence of a former Guantánamo Bay detainee as the deputy leader of Al Qaeda’s Yemeni branch has underscored the potential complications in carrying out the executive order President Obama signed Thursday that the detention center be shut down within a year. The militant, Said Ali al-Shihri, is suspected of involvement in a deadly bombing of the United States Embassy in Yemen’s capital, Sana, in September....

This does my heart good: A joke made its way around the Capitol yesterday: How do you know the 2008 election is really over? Because John McCain is causing trouble for Republicans again. Two and a half months removed from his defeat in the race for the presidency, colleagues say, McCain bears more resemblance to the unpredictable and frequently bipartisan colleague they have served with for decades than the man who ran an often scathing campaign against Barack Obama. In some instances, he’s...

John Avalon has a great piece up at David Frum’s New Majority website about how the GOP can win in New England again. He notes that before the Bush-era there were still an favorable number of Republicans holding office in New England and now there are none (two if you include New York State.) One of his tips that the party has to become a Big Tent party: Somehow Republicans have lost common ground – Reagan invoked the Big Tent constantly as a way of collecting libertarian conservatives,...

Well, it has happened – what seemed only the stuff of movies has become reality: we have an African-American president. As President Obama said, it was only six decades ago that his father would not have been served at a DC restaurant, and today, his son took the oath of office and rose to the highest position in the land. It measures what kind of country we are that an African American President took the oath of office in a building made partially by slave labor and will reside in a house...

Alex Massie has a wonderful post on how dogmatic the Republican Party has become and ties it to the history of the Conservative Party in the UK after the age of Thatcher. Reaganism helped revitalize the GOP and ushered in a conservative era in the United States. But as Massie notes, the party has become stuck in its past, unwilling to change as the nation changes, and that past has become highly fictionalized, make Reagan more doctrinaire than he was in reality. The point here is not to say how...

As the Bush Presidency winds down, the debate raging among folks is if the President or his underlings should face prosecution for using torture. During the Christmas holiday, Mort Kondracke stated that for the sake of national unity, President-elect Obama should pass on prosecuting or investigating the Bush Administration for “war crimes” done in the name of the war on terror. His reasoning is that such activities are not done in the name of “justice” but in reality, done...

An Open Letter to Mr. Chip Saltsman: Hello, my name is Dennis Sanders. I’m not anyone special, just some guy in Minnesota who blogs from time to time. I wanted to write to you about your little storm that has been brewing since you sent a holiday CD with a little ditty called “Barack the Magic Negro.” I think the whole idea of sending out this CD was a major bad idea and isn’t a good omen to what you might do as Chairman of the Republican National Committee. Yeah, I know:...

Now that President Bush has decided to go over Congress’ head and provide General Motors and Chrysler bridge loans through March, I think now is the time to see how the GOP and conservatives in general handled the issue. This is only my view and it’s the view of a crank living in Minnesota. However, in the glorious age that we live in, with handy little computers connected to the internet, one crank can share his views with the whole world and that’s what I am about to do. In...

About four years ago, I wrote something in an old blog based on a David Brooks essay from 2004. I called the post, “Towards a Progressive Conservatism” and it went something like this: I’ve been reading the new book by Jim Wallis called , God’s Politics: Why the Right Gets it Wrong and the Left Doesn’t Get It. In it, he talks about a essay written by New York Times columnist David Brooks last summer. I remember briefly looking at it, but not really getting around...

In my last year of seminary, I took a class where one of our assignments one evening was to debate the issue of slavery. Both sides used the Bible to justify their arguments. When the exercise was done, the professor told the side that was against slavery (the side I was on) that it was a losing battle to use the Bible in your argument since the other side could back up their argument with Scripture that indicated that slavery was “okay.” With that in mind, I thought this post by Adam...

From former Governor Christine Todd Whitman: To fully understand the importance of centrist Republican candidates in the 2008 elections, it is important to take a look at the results of this year’s hard fought Republican primaries and see how these candidates performed in the general election. It is in primaries, after all, where the voters must choose the candidate that best represents their own positions on the issues, the District at large, and the chances for victory in November. Their...

In the wake of the recent victory by Joseph Cao, the folks over at The Next Right envision what it might be to run a Cao-type candidate in San Francisco. They name this guy, who is Korean, Rob Wong (I thought Wong was a Chinese name). It’s an interesting and even an appealing read until you get to the last few paragraphs: At the same time, this Gay Marriage stuff has gotten under Rob’s skin. While he has gay friends, and doesn’t really have a problem with Gay Marriage, he was...

Megan McArdle has written some good pieces over the last few weeks about the domestic auto industry. While I haven’t always agreed with her, she does put forth some sound arguments. But the day after the auto bailout bill dies in the Senate and Michigan newspapers are talking about what could happen next in my home state, what is McArdle talking about on her blog? Holiday cookbooks. Bad timing. Totally bad timing.

The Detroit News is reporting that the bailout deal has failed in the Senate. In the weeks since this has become an issue, I’ve gone from saying let them hang, to doing what we can to help the Big Three, to thinking that maybe bankruptcy wouldn’t be such a bad idea. In normal times, I would say, no to any government help, but then these aren’t normal times. Maybe my fellow conservatives are correct that giving the Big Three money is just throwing good money after bad. But I...

A reader responds to a post on Rod Dreher’s blog: I am that, which for many American conservative and or literalistic and or fundamentalist Christians, does not exist: A gay man who is a Christian. And that is a big part of their problem. Beginning roughly in the late Nixon era and increasing by leaps and bounds, a very intolerant, totalitarian faction of Christians shouted down all other Christian voices in the Republican Party. Just as anyone who dared to argue that torture was not an American...

While I don’t agree with him on every issue, I have to like Michael Steele. The former Lt. Governor of Maryland is running for the leadership of the GOP. There have been rumblings from some “true believers” that, because of his work in reviving the moderate Republican Leadership Council (a group I support), he would make a bad leader for the Republican party. For a while, he was trying to distance himself from the RLC and all things moderate. Now he seems to be changing his tune: ...

There are conservatives out there that actually are for gay marriage and are also willing to call a spade a spade: The supporters of traditional family values are afraid of giving same sex couples equal protection under the law because they wonder if the next law we’ll want will allow traditional family values people like Warren Jeffs to do what they do legally. Last time I checked, the bible (which I generally consider to be a fairly authoritative source for “traditional family values”)...

It’s not often that I start to write something shaking in anger, but two fellow conservatives, Joe Carter and Daniel Larison have done just that with their callous response to a Newsweek cover story on gay marriage. What’s so callous about it, is that their words are written without understanding the life of a gay person who isn’t interested in tearing down society, but just wants that he and his partner have the same rights that Joe and Daniel have. What makes me mad is that...