Thaddeus McCotter is bored. His answers for what ails the Republican Party and the reasons he gives for why it came to its current minority status on Capitol Hill are thoughtful, even insightful. But this isn’t new territory for the four-term Michigan Republican. He responds to my questions with all the enthusiasm of someone who has been asked to repeat an old story for the hundredth time.

Until I ask him about his guitar. “George Harrison once told an interviewer that he picked up his first guitar and played it until his fingers bled,” McCotter says. “His mother asked him what he was doing and he said, ‘I’m learning how to play guitar.’” Does McCotter favor electric or acoustic? “Same six strings,” he replies matter-of-factly.

Most congressional offices are filled with mementos from the district and pictures of the congressman with important government officials. Republicans tend to favor photographs of Ronald Reagan and, until about 2005, George W. Bush. McCotter’s office has dark green walls and a picture of John Lennon hanging over his desk. There’s also a guitar, of course. It resembles a young rock fan’s bedroom as much as a quiet place to write constituent letters.

Thad McCotter is chairman of the House Republican Policy Committee, a leadership position from which he will play a role in shaping the GOP congressional agenda. When the tall, lanky congressman isn’t jamming with the bipartisan rock band called the Second Amendments — he is known for being able to play Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Free Bird” behind his back– he is being received like a rock star on a growing number of offbeat television and radio talk shows.

Dennis Miller is a McCotter fan — or likes “the cut of his jib,” as he puts it — and so is Greg Gutfeld, since the congressman’s dry sense of humor is a good fit for Red Eye, Gutfeld’s late-night show on Fox. Shortly after Barack Obama took office, Gutfeld asked McCotter the familiar question about whether the GOP was in “disarray.” His reply was typical McCotter, with carefully wielded pop culture references sending his co-panelists into guffaws as he dutifully pressed his party’s case.

Most voters (55%) don’t know enough about Paul Krugman to venture even a soft opinion about him. Those with an opinion are fairly evenly divided—22% favorable and 22% unfavorable. A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that just one-in-10 voters has a strong opinion about Krugman, with four percent (4%) voicing a Very Favorable [...]

Friday, July 24, 2009
by Frank Beckmann in the Detroit News

On Monday, President Barack Obama hailed that Apollo 11 mission that landed on the moon for sparking “innovation, the drive, the entrepreneurship, the creativity, back here on Earth.”

How right he was. Our space program led to technological advancements like breast cancer detection, digital imaging, ocular screening for young children, laser angioplasty, ultrasound scanning, arteriosclerosis detection, portable X-ray devices, MRIs and bone analyzers.

Her name was Neda. In Farsi, it means “the voice.” True to her name, she loved music; sought freedom; and she’s dead – shot down in the streets by the Iranian regime’s state sanctioned murderers. She must not have died in vain.

We live amid a chaotic age.

As with the Age of Industrialization’s dawning, this Age of Globalization’s advent is a time of promise and peril, wherein many Americans’ cherished way of life is being “creatively destroyed” by a tsunami of merciless changes seemingly beyond control.  The very concept of a sovereign nation-state is besieged by the discordant forces of disorder – and without order, there is no justice or freedom for the people.

In my youth, there was a phrase people used to express the where, in an oft too brutal world, a human being was the most secure:

“You are as safe as in your mother’s womb.”

Today, in our coarsened culture, we no longer hear the phrase.

Our camaraderie stems from our shared suffering as conservatives. Conservatism being the negation of ideology, our existence threatens the Left’s dogmatic ideologues, who revile, repress and retaliate against us: Congressional Republicans are targeted for political extinction; and Big Hollywood’s cloistered conservatives are targeted for professional ostracism.

Of course, there is an important distinction. Congressional Republicans voluntarily incurred Leftist attacks by entering politics. Republican oriented artists, however, have been involuntarily subjected to Big Hollywood’s new version of the old “blacklist’: the “C-List” of conservatives who are marked for censorship and career ruin for deviating from Left-wing orthodoxy.