First, Toomey's staff denies that he is working on a gun control compromise. Then Joe Manchin comes out and says that he was working with Toomey. Both are lies. Toomey was working with Schumer, the notorious gun control nut.

Schumer does not compromise, he wants to grab all guns from private citizens and everything he does is geared towards that end. Toomey's not an idiot, useful or otherwise. The Republicans take turns betraying liberty. The party made it clear to Toomey that it's his turn to betray us. With an "A" rating from the NRA he's the perfect turncoat. Refusal to take his turn and he's toast in the party and doomed to be stuck in the penalty box with Mike Lee and Rand Paul.

Toomey chose power over principle, but again, that's what insider Republicans do.

The Republican party is hopeless. Any issue with a downside, no matter how small that downside may be, they will surrender. Toomey was supposed to be the anti-Arlen Specter but he's doing exactly what Specter would have done - gone over to the other side.

Gun control has always been a loser for the Dems but whenever the Democrats can't get oppressive legislation through the Republicans always have just enough defectors to pass it.

Do we really have a two party system? Or is it just a show for the rubes?

Look at the comparative cancer cure rates and ask yourself if Canadians are "satisfied" with the levels of death due to breast and prostate cancer. Socialized medicine provides politically tolerable medical care for the majority. The minority can just die and save money for the majority.

"By not going heavy into Iraq and by disbanding the Iraqi military, a postwar insurgency became inevitable."

The "post war insurgency" didn't begin until the adoption of the new Iraqi constitution. The front end of that constitution had two main clauses. One was that no law may violate the "undisputed" tenets of Islam. The second clause was that no law may violate the principles of democracy. Combined they meant that any "disputed" Islamic principles would be settled "democratically".

Iraq was 80% Shia and 20% Sunni. It meant that the Sunnis would soon be voted out of existence. That was when the civil war started. The Sunnis knew that they faced extermination especially since Saddam's Sunni thugs had terrorized the country for years leaving many wounds to be avenged.

Bush's people produced the blueprint for the government which was not a government with checks and balances. No bicameral legislature, no really independent judiciary, no meaningful division of power and a "Bill of Rights" so watered down as to be meaningless. Progressives, like Bush and Obama, want unfettered democracies so the Iraqi government was a single parliamentary system unlimited in its power. All natural resources were placed under the control of the government.

Keep this model in mind because that is the model that Bush and Obama favor for America.

It's time for some truth and the truth is that the Iraqi invasion was a catastrophic mistake.

Bush believed that if one dictatorship in the Middle East could be taken down and replaced with a democratic government then the other tyrannies would collapse like dominoes and be replaced by democratic regimes. He chose a weakened regime that no one liked and that could pose few surprises since it had been under continuous aircraft based surveillance for over a decade.

Surprisingly, this strategy worked perfectly with one small unexpected development. When you establish a democracy in a region dominated by tribal warfare and clan loyalties the result is rule by the lowest common denominator and that denominator is as low as denominators can get - religious fanaticism.

Within 10 years of the invasion we see theocratic democracies taking over in Egypt, Libya and soon in Syria and Lebanon. Countries that were nominally Islamic but still retaining some sensible secular principles have deteriorated into full fledged Islamist states. Having turned a basically secular dictatorship into an Islamist free-for-all the US now must contend with the deranged Islamist thugs that have risen to power in the surrounding region.

We have gone abroad in search of monsters to destroy but their destruction merely resulted in new and worse monsters.

Alinsky is the wrong tool. Alinksy's stuff works if you want to destroy someone, but not if you want to build something. The Democrats know that the Republicans stand for nothing that allows the Dems to win by default. It becomes a matter of who can lie better. Who really would protect Social Security? Who really will protect Medicare? etc.

For Republicans to win they have to take chances and attack some of the sacred cows of the welfare state. That takes guts, knowledgeable arguments and dedication. The Republicans have none of these.

Paulson was clueless. He said he needed 700 billion dollars to prevent immediate economic collapse. No one believed him and the proof is twofold.

One, Paulson said that economic collapse was a matter of days away yet Congress took two weeks to act and added 140 billion dollars in pork to the bill. The country should have perished if Paulson was right. Fortunately, Paulson was utterly incompetent. That's not just my opinion, it's the opinion of David Stockman.

Two, the money was supposedly needed to purchase "toxic assets" yet not a single toxic asset was purchased. The money went to bail out AIG and protect Goldman Sachs. Then the money was used to preserve the corpse of General Motors and buy union votes by giving them an auto company.

There never was a crisis, it was all contrived to protect incompetent bankers. Had they been allowed to go broke and their assets sold to people who knew what to do with them the recession would have been over in 18 months. The length of a recession or depression is directly proportional to the amount of government spending and regulation. If you want a fast recovery, cut the spending and deregulate.

"Republicans didn't demand reform of Wall Street to prevent such calamaties, but robotically demanded "less regulations!" and so watered down the Dodd-Frank bill that it's worse than useless. "

What you fail to understand is that deregulation is the cure for the banking problems, not the cause. Banks are the most heavily regulated industry in America and the regulations are designed to restrict competition by placing expensive compliance costs on smaller banks. The government also provides cheap insurance for depositors so that banks never have to worry about what to do if they screw up and lose vast sums of money in bad investments.

Read John Allison's book on the problems with banks: "The Banking Crisis and the Free Market Cure". He covers it in great detail.

The author says that the Republicans have to change the way that they present ideas and make those ideas more personal. Horsepuckey! You'll note that the author never mentioned what those ideas are beyond small government.

The Republicans didn't lose because the Democrats successfully sold "progressive" ideas. They lost because they held the very same ideas. Obama supported the TARP. So did Romney. Obama supported Walls Street bailouts. So did Romney. Obama supported compulsory medical insurance (ObamaCare). So did Romney (RomneyCare the blueprint for ObamaCare). Obama's "Science Czar" John Holdren was Romney's former science adviser. Romney's top economic adviser was Greg Mankiw, a thorough going Keynesian just like Christine Romer and Austan Goolsbee, Obama's advisers.

When a Republican says he believes in small government people laugh. Not one Republican candidate since Reagan ever did anything to make government smaller.

The Democrats didn't win because the country accepted Progressivism. They won because the Republicans accepted Progressivism.

Kyle wasn't the "disturbed ex soldier". It was Kyle who gave the gun to the disturbed ex-soldier in an attempt to help him deal with PTSD. It was Kyle whose judgment was being questioned by Ron Paul.

Kyle took a chance in attempting to help the shooter. It went bad. Kyle was no idiot so I'm sure he understood that things might not turn out well. I'm not blaming the victim, the shooter is the only one to blame for the killing. I'm saying that Kyle misjudged the state of mind of the shooter. It was a mistake, but sometimes mistakes are fatal.