If we spend money (well-budgeted and accounted for money) on the war against terrorism or the war in Iraq or the War in Afghanistan, I am less worried about the amount of spending than I am about achieving victory as a military outcome. If it means providing first-rate medical care to the soldiers, that's very OK too.
If I knew that we could end abortion only by spending an affordable amount of money (I cannot imagine a real-world scenario on this but just for the sake of argument), I would spend the money as the lesser of two evils. I regard abortion as the single worst evil in our nation's history.
Fortunately, we seldom need to make a choice between fiscal conservatism and social conservatism since the GOP is the primary vehicle for both forms.
There is a Republican Assembly in Illinois but I have never met any of them. In the rural Northwestern areas of Illinois, we are too busy electing conservative Republicans to worry too much about forming internal caucuses much less about giving primary loyalty to groups independent of the GOP. This strategy works. John Anderson (of World Federalist and 3rd party presidential candidacy fame) used to be the congresscritter here. Today, he could not get elected dogcatcher here even by Republicans who might not be doglovers. Don Manzullo, our current Congressman, is one of the most conservative in Congress.
Of course, we are still aspiring to emulate those who have been represnted by Nickles, Inhofe, Coburn (especially Coburn: we are "purely" green with envy). We are trying to see other areas of Illinois be similarly determined to shred Durbin, Blagojevich (or however he spells his name) and Obama (as one Freeper put it, like Lincoln only better, at least in his own mind).
God bless you and yours.
I second that! There are a lot of programs I find necessary. That said I want my state to get back in highway funds what they pay in with their taxes on gasoline and quit funding the Northeast by more than what they paid into the fund. I would love to get rid of some of the pork starting with Byrd in West Virginia as well who is named the king of pork for good reason.
I don't compromise on Defense spending at all -- spent my entire adult life around the Air Force and DoD activities and know how vital they are to our security. For every story about an overrun there are plenty of stories that don't make the news about cost saving measures that have helped throughout the AF.
Dr. Tom is the success story of the decade in politics IMHO of someone who got in the primary race late, energized the base, won the primary without a run-off, and clobbered the RAT in the general election even though people like Denny Hastert said he was going to lose. I remember Cong Istook getting so upset he went charging into the Speaker's office to tell him he was dead wrong. We had one of the best grassroots movements I have ever been associated.
Dr. Tom never wavered in his beliefs and neither did all of us working to elect him -- it was a lot of work but a lot of fun. Never regretted going over to the Coburn campaign when he announced from another campaign where I suspected the candidate was just mouthing the words of being a conservative -- he was better than the RAT by a long shot but could not compare to Dr. Tom. With Dr. Tom I knew he was a conservative.