Power Line points to this interesting piece from the Times of London on the second Bush term. As the Times notes:

[President Bush] still has plenty of proposals for domestic policy left in him. These range from making permanent tax cuts that were passed in his opening term and the partial privatisation of American pensions to his ambition to curtail the outrageous costs of the US legal system. His new Cabinet members are not noticeably weaker than his previous colleagues. His party runs each branch of Congress and, thanks to the November election results, with greater majorities. For the first time since 1937 a re-elected president who has been in Washington for four years starts again with congressional enhancement, not erosion.

This presidency will thus be different. Mr Bush will be more active at home than is typical of second-term chief executives. He will not be forced to immerse himself in foreign affairs and, when he does, the limitations on him will largely be practical (particularly the course of events in Iraq) and not political. He may also have a very distinct notion of what he wants his legacy to be than other presidents. Rather than engage in the implausible pursuit of the Nobel Peace Prize, he might aspire to be remembered as the man who won the War on Terror. It is unlikely that he will invade any more rogue states, but that is mostly because such ventures will either be deemed unnecessary or unfeasible.

Bush’s second term is being viewed as a mandate for his policies, and given that he got a majority of the electorate for the first time since 1988 he certainly has reason to believe it. Bush can’t be more vilified by the foreign and domestic press, to no avail, so Bush will be in no mood to court the Washington establishment. Instead, it’s likely that we’ll see Bush push for his Social Security initiatives, making the tax cuts permanent, and other domestic priorities. Right now the situation in Iraq is largely in the hands of the Iraqi people. As the Iraqis take an increasing amount of responsibility for their own defense we’ll be able to slowly withdraw. Despite the constant stream of abject negativity from the press, the situation in Iraq is slowly marching towards normalcy. The terrorists are still centered in the Sunni Triangle and Iraqi forces are getting better and bolder in confronting those who would throw them into shari’a against their will.

At the same time, Bush has some problems that he needs to address. The deficit is still far too large and Bush must enforce fiscal discipline on Congress. Given that he’s hardly a miser when it comes to federal spending, it may well be the other way around. Bush has already indicated that he’s preemptively surrendering on the issue of gay marriage. While the Federal Marriage Amendement is probably a non-starter, backing off on it won’t endear Bush to the evangelical members of his base. Bush also has to keep the pressure on in the War on Terrorism while dealing with the threat of a nuclear North Korea and Iran.

Bush is in a rare situation for a second-term President. The Republicans control Congress, Bush has a larger mandate than he did in the first term, and he has the opportunity to push through his policy agenda in a way that he did not in his first term. At the same time, he has to work with a Democratic Party that is dead-set on obstructing his agenda, a media that has every interest in bringing him down regardless of the costs to their credibility, and a war against a shadowy and difficult enemy. Only time will tell if he has truly seized the opportunities given to him or if his second term will be as weak as some of his predecessors.

Eugene Volokh points to an exhaustive study by the National Academy of Sciences that find no evidence that gun control correlates to lower levels of crime. As noted anti-gun control advocate John Lott points out:

Based on 253 journal articles, 99 books, 43 government publications, and some of its own empirical work, the panel couldn’t identify a single gun control regulation that reduced violent crime, suicide or accidents.

James Q. Wilson, one of the most respected social scientists of our time even went so far as to write a dissenting reporting noting that the study indicated that shall-issue laws actually reduce crime. The fact is that if you’re willing to commit a murder or robbery with a gun, you can get a gun. No law is going to prevent that. Criminals have easy access to weapons and they don’t care about registrations or permits. The only way to make sure that crime stays low is to reduce the chances that a crime will be successfu. If a criminal thinks that the young woman walking through that parking lot at night might have a gun and know how to use it, he’s going to be less likely to harm her. If he’s dumb enough to do so, the chances of him getting away to commit another crime drops precipitously.

The NAS report only confirms what common sense tell us — a society that is armed is a society in which criminals take a much larger risk. A supine and disarmed populace makes for a larger groups of targets. Disarming America benefits only the criminals who already have access to all the weapons they need.

I haven’t been following the issue of Armstrong Williams nearly as closely as I should, but Michelle Malkin continues to follow the story closely. Williams was a radio talk-show host and conservative columnist who was found to have been given nearly a quarter of a million dollars by the Department of Education in order to flog the No Child Left Behind Act.

As a conservative, I’m livid over this. First of all, Williams continues to insist that he did nothing wrong. However, not disclosing that you’re getting paid to shill for someone is certainly unethical, and taking government money may very well be illegal. William’s actions are completely indefensible, and the fact that someone thought this might be a good idea is extremely disturbing.

The No Child Left Behind Act is a betrayal of conservative values. While it has had some positive effects, it continues the increasing federalization of education, a trend that has hampered teachers and reduced educational quality nationwide for decades. On the issue of education, the Republican Party differs only from the Democrats in that the Democrats can at least be expected to get votes for being a slavishly adherent to the teacher’s unions. The Republicans have no excuse.

No wonder the Department of Education had to pay shills to talk up the bill — it was such a bad piece of legislation that no one would have accepted it otherwise. Congress would be wise to reappropriate the money from No Child Left Behind back to the states who can give teachers the funding and tools they need rather than the one-size fits all dreck that some bureaucrat in DC thinks they need. A truly conservative solution does not involve sinking billions in federal dollars into a program that puts the interests of bureaucrats above those of teachers. As one teacher writes to Malkin:

I’m a public school teacher in an “urban” school district in suburban Detroit. Here is the short version of my NCLB nightmare.

After battling administrators, I was finally able to bring trainers into the district to teach a phonetic language arts method.

A few of us took the training, we used it in the classroom. Results were great. The superintendent and our district reading coordinator (whom I had to battle to get the training) loved what was happening.

NCLB comes along. Our reading coordinator smells the money, and applies for a Reading First grant. She’s approved and we’re stuck using a government-approved, whole-language reading series.

Since it only covers grades K-3, I moved to 4th, where I’ve been teaching my students to read, write, and spell the right way. My big decision now is: do we read Hamlet, Macbeth, or Julius Ceasar in the spring? Otherwise, I will be watching the parade of illiterates pass through our district.

President Bush got elected largely because of the support of American conservatives. Between this and his disastrous and foolish non-amnesty amnesty program for illegal immigrants he is in real danger of splitting that coalition. Bush has promised to spend the political capital he earned in the election — too bad he is spending it so unwisely.

UPDATE: Yes, yes, I know that Kos was also in the pocket of the Dean campaign. First of all, anyone who doesn’t know that Kos is the worst kind of political whore by now has been living under a rock for the past year. Secondly, Kos did disclose that he was working for the Dean campaign, and as I recall he disclosed it more than once. Finally, that doesn’t in any way justify unethical behavior. Just because they do it doesn’t give us the right to do — I see that argument from the Democrats all the time, and it’s no less egregious when applied to those I happen to agree with.

Captain Ed reports on three Democratic elected officials in Kentucky who have switched over to the GOP. As he notes:

Democrats have steadily lost people such as Chuck Hickman and Tommy Sampson, and electoral results have reflected that. In the past three election cycles, Democrats have lost almost 20% of their Senate seats and a big chunk of their House contingent as well. They ran far to the left against a man they painted as the most radically conservative president in American history — and 62 million Americans disagreed with that analysis. They understood that a party hijacked by the Stalin apologists at International ANSWER and the radicals at MoveOn would see Eisenhower as radically conservative, or at least paint him as such in an attempt to grasp power.

In the last election 11% of Democrats voted for Bush. Only 8% of Republicans crossed over for Kerry. GOP voter ID has increased considerably in the last few election cycles, now at parity or above Democratic voter ID. The South has become solidly Republican, including Florida.

The problem is simple: what to the Democrats stand for? In the last election it was “not being Bush.” Even if the Democrats abandon their Ahab-like fixation on the President, it still doesn’t reconcile them with the fact that they no represent an ideology that is completely outside the mainstream of American politics. The more the Democrats try to embrace the “progressive” agenda the worse they do. Rather than moving towards the center, the Democrats are embracing the far left, which is why they ended up in this mess in the first place.

What few moderate Democrats that remain are becoming increasingly isolated in their own party. Until the Democrats grow up and stop blaming their problems on everyone else but themselves, they will continue to be a party marginalized. This country needs a smart and respectable opposition party, and fortunately American politics finds a balance sooner or later. The question that arises is how long it will take the Democrats to realize that their current strategy is a loser?

Mitch Berg notes that MoveOn.org wants to take over the leadership of the Democratic Party:

A scathing e-mail from the head of MoveOn’s political action committee to the group’s supporters on Thursday targets outgoing Democratic National Committee chairman Terry McAuliffe as a tool of corporate donors who alienated both traditional and progressive Democrats.

“For years, the party has been led by elite Washington insiders who are closer to corporate lobbyists than they are to the Democratic base,” said the e-mail from MoveOn PAC’s Eli Pariser. “But we can’t afford four more years of leadership by a consulting class of professional election losers.”

Under McAuliffe’s leadership, the message said, the party coddled the same corporate donors that fund Republicans to bring in money at the expense of vision and integrity.

“In the last year, grass-roots contributors like us gave more than $300 million to the Kerry campaign and the DNC, and proved that the party doesn’t need corporate cash to be competitive,” the message continued. “Now it’s our party: we bought it, we own it, and we’re going to take it back.”

This is like the Democrats shooting themselves in the foot with a pistol, then switching to a rifle and shooting the other foot, then debating dropping a small tactical nuke on themselves. MoveOn.org represents a small radical fringe of the Democratic Party, and their overheated rhetoric drove far more votes from Kerry than they ever gained. If MoveOn gains effective control over the Democratic Party, the Democrats will end up going the way of the Whigs and the days of Democratic majorities will end as the party splits between moderate Democrats and radical liberal extremists.

Which is why I’m sure that a MoveOn.org takeover of the Democratic Party would be the best Christmas gift Karl Rove could ever ask for…