Responding to Harry R. Jackson: "Desperate for Change"

"An integral part of this re-inventing must be recruiting a new field of younger non-traditional candidates rich with women, blacks, and Hispanics."

True conservatives do not care one whit if you are female, black, hispanic, white, yellow or purple. Merit is king. Color is meaningless.

Do you have principled, core values? Do you have leadership capability? Do you have integrity to follow through on the things you say? That will count more than any color or happenstance of birth.

"The average person sees us as doctrinaire, mean-spirited, and hypocritical."

They may see you that way. I am seen in my community as a person with moral and character, willing to stand by my beliefs and by my words. I am a conservative. I am not a politician.

The vast majority of Americans may see politicians that call themselves Republican that way. That is a richly deserved and broadly painted brush that affects most of the Republicans currently holding tenuously onto their seats in Washington.

Those seats are not deserved if they do not hold on to their true principles. If they are to embark upon massive spending, and the uncontrolled growth of government, they may as well change their party affiliation and stand for the position that they really embody.

Liberals play the game of classification. They pay attention to your color, your sex, your religion. They then turn it to their advantage. Leave classification at the door. It has no place in the future of conservatism.

In Response to Bill Steigerwald's Column: Bill Bennett to GOP: Let's Get to Work
By acting upon our values, we will succeed again. In business, we succeed because we provide a good product.

This is the why, and the when, that we succeed in politics. When our message is strong and we believe in it, it will come across as the natural 'common sense' that it is.

As soon as we try and play the liberal game their way, we will lose. This has been proven handily in the last two elections.

Remember what you believe and why.

I believe in free market capitalism because it has worked to build my success and the success of others.

I believe in Judeo-Christian values because it has worked to help up my neighbors to success, even when they fall upon hard times.

I believe in ethical treatment of others because it ensures a smooth and functioning transition between the very cycles that we all experience in life.

What do you believe?

In Response to Ken Connor's "But Regulation IS a Good Thing"

First, I do agree that as an aggregate in our society, we are showing more of the bad choices, and fewer of the good choices. I believe that this is the point where our agreement will end, however.

First, Paulson's actions are easily identifiable. He is exhibiting the very greed you are lumping on society. He has injected capital into banks in classic crony capitalism fashion. If you can help your buddies have an easier time through a tough time, make it happen. That succinctly explains his actions. His rationalization for his actions are irrelevant.

Next, throwing laissez-faire capitalism under the bus without properly explaining your context is dishonest. The fact that regulations are unpredictable and undeniably dishonest and unfairly distributed explain a great deal more than the claim that laissez-faire would equal chaos, or is to blame for the current business climate.

Quite the opposite is true in the real world of business. In local communities, the reputation of the business and its practices are evaluated at every transaction. You must provide an honest effort and/or product, in order to continue to receive business from the individual who is purchasing from you.

It is when the business learns to take advantage of government regulations and exerts force via government fiat that the real examples of greed exhibit themselves. The more you make these tools available to business, the more they will attempt to leverage them against their competition. Government's own chickens coming home to roost.

These same tools were handed to the end consumer in recent history. Too easy credit, coupled with government guarantees on extremely high credit risks to purchase homes built an unsustainable business environment.

That same environment allowed many bad actors to enter and earn capital for themselves temporarily in a field that they had no real interest in sustaining, and no real interest in providing honest effort when the easier effort was so readily available.

Government cannot control free will. It can only punish ill behaviors after the fact. When it intentionally removes the honest constraints of credit and even, fair distribution of rules, it invites the bad actors to take advantage of the inherent unfairness, and creates the very environment that you are discussing.