In 2004, after narrowly defeating John Kerry, President Bush boasted he had earned political capital and he intended to spend it.

What political capital, then, have Democrats just earned?

The dust has settled, most of the results are now in, and for Republicans, the results are not good. Democrats have taken solid control of the House, capturing 27 Republican-held seats and leading in two other races. They are on the verge of taking the Senate as well, with Democratic wins in Virginia and Montana likely, although not yet certain.

Ultimately, one can point to two things that cost Republicans this election: Mark Foley and Iraq. Exit polls indicated many voters were unhappy with Bush, with the war in Iraq, and with what they perceived to be corruption in Congress.

The jury is still out on the corruption—that issue will undoubtedly come up again and again in the not so distant future—but clearly Iraq is not going to go away anytime soon. To paraphrase an old saying: Republicans made their own bed on that one, and now they have to lie in it.

The “good” news for conservatives? We’ve essentially been operating with a Democratic-controlled Congress since Bush became president. Republicans technically controlled Congress, but the result was out of control government spending and big government policies. Maybe now that they’re no longer the party in power, Republicans will make some sort of attempt to return to their fiscally conservative roots.

Today President Bush signed legislation legalizing 700 miles of new fencing along the porous Mexican border to complement the meager 90 miles of fencing already present. The bill also authorizes an additional 1500 border patrol troops.

At the bill signing, the President urged Congress to find a solution for illegal aliens already in the country, namely by pushing his guestworker plan. “We must reduce pressure on our border by creating a temporary worker plan,” Bush remarked. “Willing workers ought to be matched with willing employers to do jobs Americans are not doing.”

Back home, citizens along the Texas border aren’t sure what to think yet. Large sections of the fencing will cut through residential and agricultural areas, cutting off access to the Rio Grande River, which farmers depend on. “It’s not going to work in Texas,” says ranch-owner Michael Vickers. “Who wants to close off the river to Mexico? The river is the lifeblood for a lot of cities.”

Cost estimates range from $2 billion to $9 billion over the next several years. The entire Homeland Security budget for this year was only $1.2 billion, which means Congress will have to appropriate more and more funds as the project progresses.

Yesterday a Brooklyn man was arrested on charges of conspiring to support a terrorist group. Javed Iqbal allegedly provided Hezbollah’s sattelite channel, al-Manar, in the U.S. via his sattelite company.

The U.S. Treasury Department in March designated al-Manar a “global terrorist entity” and a media arm of the Hezbollah terrorist network. The designation froze al-Manar’s assets in the United States and prohibited any transactions between Americans and al-Manar.

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Mark Dubowitz of the Coalition Against Terrorist Media (CATM), which is composed of Jewish, Christian, Muslim and secular organizations, said yesterday he is “saddened” that a U.S. resident was allegedly facilitating the transmission of al-Manar “but pleased that the U.S. is taking the necessary steps to ensure al-Manar’s incitement to violence is stopped.”

Mr. Iqbal, who owns and operates the sattelite company from his home, has been arraigned in federal court, and bail set at $250,000.

Tom DeLay, the scandal-plagued former House Majority Leader, announced today that he is resigning from Congress. He presumably will also be ending his current re-election campaign.

This is probably the best thing for everyone involved. Regardless of whether DeLay actually committed any crime himself or not, the corruption surrounding him is impossible to defend and did not reflect well on him.

From the AP:

DeLay reflected Republican concerns that the GOP could lose the seat in November, saying his love and loyalty to the party played a role in his decision and adding, “I refuse to allow liberal Democrats an opportunity to steal this seat with a negative, personal campaign.”

President Bush said Tuesday that DeLay had informed him of his decision Monday afternoon.

“I wish him all the best,” Bush told reporters during a brief White House session, adding, “It had to have been a very difficult decision for someone who loved representing his district in the state of Texas.”

Bush said the Republican Party won’t suffer from DeLay’s decision to resign from Congress. “My own judgment is that our party will continue to succeed because we are the party of ideas.”

DeLay relinquished the post as House majority leader last fall after his indictment in Texas as part of an investigation into the allegedly illegal use of funds for state legislative races. He decided in January against trying to get the leadership post back as an election-year corruption scandal staggered Republicans and emboldened minority Democrats.

The flap in Europe about the cartoons depicting Muhammad caused a staggering amount of political correctness, even in the U.S. Here is the latest example, this time from two bookstores who are refusing to carry a magazine that has some of the cartoons printed in it:

BUFFALO, N.Y. — Borders and Waldenbooks stores will not stock the April-May issue of Free Inquiry magazine because it contains cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad that provoked deadly protests among Muslims in several countries.

“For us, the safety and security of our customers and employees is a top priority, and we believe that carrying this issue could challenge that priority,” Borders Group Inc. spokeswoman Beth Bingham said Wednesday.

The magazine, published by the Council for Secular Humanism in suburban Amherst, includes four of the drawings that originally appeared in a Danish newspaper in September, including one depicting Muhammad wearing a bomb-shaped turban with a lit fuse.

Certainly these stores have a right to decide what they do and do not want to run, and they are exercizing that right in this situation. Having said that, the reasons they are giving—”the safety and security of our customers and employees”—is extremely interesting and eye-opening. Perhaps the stores were afraid they would face something similar to what happened over in Europe? After all, it’s a bit of an understatement to say that many Muslims didn’t exactly take a peaceful approach when objecting to and protesting the cartoons.

There’s an interesting new poll out that seems to indicate most people think Hillary Clinton will run for president in 2008, but not win.

According to the poll, two thirds of Americans believe Clinton will run for president, and two thirds of Americans think her campaign will end in defeat.

Interestingly enough, most people feel the same way about Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice, although Rice has already indicated she’s not interesting in running.

Here’s the most intriguing part of the poll:

Twenty-seven percent of voters said they were not likely to vote for a woman candidate in 2008 no matter which party ticket she headed, according to the poll sponsored by WNBC-TV in New York City. Of that 27 percent, almost one-third said they wouldn’t back a female candidate because “women are not up to the job” while 10 percent said it was because the presidency is “a man’s job.”

I wonder if poll respondents gave those two reasons on their own, or if they had to pick from a set of answers and picked those two because they were the “best” ones.

For more info on the subject, see Theresa Moss’s informative article in a previous issue of Virtue Mag.

We have here another letter to the editor, but this time it’s one I’ve written. And it’s not about the Constitution or what powers the president should or should not have; instead, it’s about Dick Cheney’s recent hunting accident.

First, you should all read the following pathetic opinion piece that appeared in my college’s newspaper today.

It’s a liberal newspaper (big surprise there, no?), so there is a lot of this kind of stuff that appears frequently, but this hatchet piece actually got me worked up enough to fire off a quick letter to the editor:

Dear Editor,

There are many things that Dick Cheney should rightfully be criticized for, including his role in starting the war in Iraq and “Plamegate.” But the recent hunting accident is not one of those things.

Tanner Kent’s Voices article in the Feb. 16th edition of the Reporter (“It Gets Worse”) appeared to be nothing more than a childish and vindictive attempt to politicize this very unfortunate incident. How about showing a little class, Tanner? Accidents happen—to everyone. Cheney shot a close friend, and he undoubtedly feels terrible about it. Your inappropiate attempt to smear Cheney over this specific incident reveals more about yourself than it does Cheney.

It seems convenient, by the way, that Tanner forgot to mention one very important fact—news reports seem to indicate that the victim of the shooting was at least partially responsible for the accident. Tanner also was apparently too busy trying to imply that Cheney was drunk to mention that law enforcement officials have ruled out alcohol as a factor in the incident.

After the indictment of “Scooter” Libby over the “Plamegate” scandal, there was a lot of talk about whether—and if so, how much—Vice President Dick Cheney was involved in the matter. Would Cheney face possible legal trouble as well?

Today’s article in the National Journal may provide us with some clues:

Vice President Dick Cheney’s former chief of staff, I. Lewis (Scooter) Libby, testified to a federal grand jury that he had been “authorized” by Cheney and other White House “superiors” in the summer of 2003 to disclose classified information to journalists to defend the Bush administration’s use of prewar intelligence in making the case to go to war with Iraq, according to attorneys familiar with the matter, and to court records.

Libby specifically claimed that in one instance he had been authorized to divulge portions of a then-still highly classified National Intelligence Estimate regarding Saddam Hussein’s purported efforts to develop nuclear weapons, according to correspondence recently filed in federal court by special prosecutor Patrick J. Fitzgerald.

This should be very interesting to watch unfold.

I’m sitting here at my college’s library, typing on a computer. I just got out of a Sociology class where, after a lecture on domestic abuse, the professor decided to have a class discussion about gay marriage.

For the record, this is the professor who has, in previous classes, praised Karl Marx for having “a lot of good things to say,” condemned the U.S. government for not building houses for the homeless, criticized Bush for his supposed mistreatment of Muslims post 9/11, and so on and so forth.

In short, I am stuck in a class with a professor who is the perfect example of the far-left professors who dominate our nation’s (mostly) far-left universities. (Thank goodness for places like Hillsdale College and Patrick Henry College, no?)

Anyway, it appeared that a large majority of the kids in this class saw nothing wrong with gay marriage. Of course, maybe it just appeared that way since maybe all the conservative kids (like me) stayed mostly quiet. But on an estimate, I’d say that probably two/thirds of the class appeared to support gay marriage.

If this is any indication of what’s on the way for our nation, gay marriage is coming soon. And there won’t be anything we as conservatives will be able to do. Right now a majority of Americans oppose gay marriage, but how many of those Americas are, say, 40 years and older? In 20 years, our population will have changed, and it seems to me that our population will be growing more liberal. And there is nothing we can really do about it.

Depressing thought, no? I agree. Sitting through a college class like this is the most depressing things a conservative can do. Especially when you listen to some of the things students (and the professor say):

Gay marriage won’t affect heterosexuals, so why should they object?

If two people love each other, they should be allowed to marry, and it doesn’t matter if they’re the same sex.

And so on and so forth. My question to our readers is this: what do you think is the most effective way to refute the above arguments? And what do you think about the future of our country?

Two news items have popped up in the last day or so, and both involve our (largely ignored) problems on the Mexico/U.S. border.

First, the Mexican government announced yesterday that it would be distributing over 70,000 maps to potential illegal immigrants gathering near the U.S. border. The maps illustrate where, for example, highways and water stations exist in Arizona. They also warn Mexicans where not to go in Arizona.

But don’t worry—none of this will promote illegal immigration into the U.S.!

The National Human Rights Commission, a government-funded agency with independent powers, denied that the maps—similar to a comic-style guide booklet Mexico distributed last year—would encourage illegal immigration.

``We are not trying in any way to encourage or promote migration,’’ said Mauricio Farah, one of the commission’s national inspectors. ``The only thing we are trying to do is warn them of the risks they face and where to get water, so they don’t die.’‘

I like what Mark Krikorian—executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies—had to say:

``What’s next? Are they going to buy them bus tickets to Chicago?’‘

In another slightly-related incident, a standoff in Texas between the U.S. border patrol and Mexican smugglers has drawn a fair amount of attention despite the national media’s virtual cover-up of the story.

A West Texas standoff along the Rio Grande between U.S. law enforcement officers and heavily armed Mexican drug smugglers in military-style clothing prompted congressional demands Tuesday for an international investigation and a call for deployment of U.S. troops to the border.

The incident, which occurred Monday on U.S. soil at an isolated river crossing about 50 miles east of El Paso, is the latest involving armed incursions along the U.S. border with Mexico.

And it comes less than a week after Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff called a California newspaper’s account of such border incursions “overblown.”

The incident Monday involved an encounter between two Hudspeth County Sheriff’s Department deputies and three Department of Public Safety troopers and 10 heavily armed drug smugglers at an area about 50 miles down the river from El Paso.

Let’s see if President Bush will actually do something about the border now.

La Shawn Barber and Michelle Malkin both have done quite a bit of blogging about the subject.