Hostettler Money Bomb

Bikes as in motorcycles are my passion!! It doesn’t matter what make or what year it is, I can turn any old bike into a beauty. It’s like an art to me. I’ve mastered the art of personalizing, customizing and perfecting old bikes. I get a lot of my motorcycle parts and accessories from online and find it really convenient.

For the most part people enjoy riding motorcycles, but a lot just like buying the bikes brand new. Others though are a bit more obsessed so to speak, to the extent of collecting, redesigning, customizing and the model can be anything from a 1950 to a brand new 2012 model. Some even spend a whole lot of money to get their bikes customized specifically for them.  Vamping up our bikes is definitely a new trend that has come on in the last ten years. It seems like now a days everyone wants to add a personal touch to their bikes.  In whole, the end product can turn out so great, that it’s definitely worth the while and the money to get your bike exactly the way you want it. Although getting a brand new bike is fun and exciting, it’s a great feeling and extremely rewarding to spend the time remodeling, redesigning old bikes in all their glory.  You can end up with a great bike collection if you buy old cheap bikes, or you can then sell them and make some profit on them too.

A lot of bike owners view this as a waste of time, but showing your personality as you ride around is a great feeling and full of pride.  I personally take great pride in all the details and preparing my plan. And that is the first step you have to take in making sure that your bike will turn out just the way you want it. Far too often I see people come in my shop who are not happy with the final design, making mistakes on their projects due to the lack of preparation and planning. The thing to remember is that even if you have a great idea in mind and know what your end product will look like, you have to put it down on paper, and gather all of your information, paint colors, motorcycle parts, etc. This is extremely important in creating your perfect bike. You should plan your project just as an artist would prepare its canvas, and that way you will end up with a fine work of art!

The antiwar ex-congressman is outpolling former Sen. Dan Coats in match-ups against the likely Democratic nominees for retiring Sen. Evan Bayh’s U.S. Senate seat (which had once been Coats’s seat).

Here are the latest Daily Kos/Research 2000 numbers. Hostettler runs at 40 percent against Brad Ellsworth (36 percent) and 42 percent against Baron Hill (36 percent). Coats is virtually tied with Ellsworth (37 to 36 percent) and Hill (37 to 37 percent). Against a third Democrat, Jim Schellinger, Hostettler scores 44 percent (to 33 percent) and Coats 39 percent (to 34 percent).

Does Hostettler’s antiwar streak resonate with voters beyond the GOP base? Are Republicans themselves wary of Coats’s lobbying ties? And can Hostettler raise the money to capitalize on these early numbers? It’s a little too soon for answers to any of those questions to be clear, but one place to look for the general lay of land is Jim Antle’s TACarticle “Hoosier Hopeful,” which is online today.

Like life itself, politics isn’t always fair. Just ask former Congressman John Hostettler, a six-term Republican from Indiana. On most of the big questions that President Bush got disastrously wrong—the unfunded Medicare prescription drug benefit, the unpopular war in Iraq, and, of particular importance to VDARE.COM readers, theamnesty for illegal immigrants traveling under the name of “comprehensive immigration reform”—Hostettler got it right.

Among prominent Republicans, only Pat Buchanan and Ron Paul were more independent—and more willing to oppose the Bush administration from the right.

Yet that didn’t prevent Hostettler from being swept out of office in the midterm elections’ anti-Bush tide. His House seat was one of the very first called for the Democrats in 2006, as he took just 39 percent of the vote against achallenger who imitated him on immigration and wanted it both ways on Iraq.

To add insult to injury, Hostettler’s loss was cited by the Wall Street Journal as a data point against both immigration restrictionists (in a gloating editorial) and antiwar conservatives (by James Taranto). After all, Hostettler stood like a stone wall against the 2006 amnesty bill from his perch as chairman of the House Judiciary Committee’s immigration subcommittee. Also, a member of the House Armed Services Committee, he was one of just six House Republicans to vote against authorizing the war. Obviously, the argument went, for Republicans there was no winning alternative to what Steve Sailer has described as Invade the World/Invite World.

Indeed, that’s the line President Bush himself has taken in his farewell tour, unabashed by presiding over a spectacular decline in Republican fortunes. In an exit interview with FOX News, alongside his father, the presidentboasted that he did not “bail out my political  party” by withdrawing troops “during the darkest days of Iraq.” (It may have been the only bailout he opposed.) Then in his final press conference, Bush lectured Republicans to be“open minded”—presumably as in open borders—rather than “anti-immigrant.”

Further compounding the injustice is the reception given Hostettler’s book explaining his war vote, Nothing for the Nation: Who Got What Out of Iraq. Hostettler was an early skeptic of WMD claims that were originally accepted even by most mainstream war critics. Despite that obvious news angle, no major publisher was interested in his book. The ex-congressman had to release it through his own small publishing house. (He will probably make more money if you buy the book direct from its website).

When Nothing For The Nation hasn’t been ignored, it has elicited the usual smears from the usual suspects. Based on the book’s treatment of neoconservatives, Abe Foxman charges the congressman with “outlandish notions of secret Jewish cabals”. [Here We Go Again: Blaming the Jews for the Iraq War, by Abraham H. Foxman, August 14, 2008] But Hostettler—an evangelical sympathetic to Christian Zionism and the state of Israel—makes no such noxious claims. His foreign-policy arguments may be debatable, but he makes specific criticisms of specific individuals rather than any ethnic or religious group.

As a leader of the patriotic immigration reform movement, of course, Hostettler is used to being called names. In the spring and summer of 2006, as the immigration debate raged on Capitol Hill, he was one of the legislators who argued that House Republicans should defy the Senate and defy their own president by refusing to bring“comprehensive” immigration legislation up for a vote.

Then-House Judiciary Committee Chairman James Sensenbrenner was instrumental in keeping the GOP leadership from caving. Tom Tancredo, then-chairman of the Congressional Immigration Reform Caucus, was the public face of the anti-amnesty congressmen. But Hostettler, at the helm of the House’s most important immigration subcommittee, also played a key role.

Hostettler’s position on Iraq failed to gain much traction among his fellow Republicans. Seven Republicans in the entire Congress voted against the war resolution and only about as many oppose the war today. But on immigration, Hostettler’s side carried the day. According to the Washington Post, 75 percent of the House Republican Conference opposed the Senate immigration bill.[Immigration Deal at Risk as House GOP Looks to Voters, By Jim VandeHei and Zachary A. Goldfarb, May 28, 2006] That legislation only passed the upper chamber due to a high number of Democratic votes.

Opposition wasn’t limited to conservative hardliners. Such liberal Republicans as Chris Shays of Connecticut and Charlie Bass of New Hampshire also refused to support the Senate’s approach to immigration policy. With such a high percentage of the Republican caucus opposed, the leadership had good reason to remain steadfast—despite pressure from their president and their Senate colleagues.

In September 2005, President Bush received an early warning sign that his expansive view of immigration policy wasn’t going to carry the day among House Republicans. Hostettler, along with past immigration subcommittee chairman Lamar Smith, sent the president a toughly worded pro-enforcement letter:

“We write as Members of Congress concerned about immigration. Recently there has been much discussion of new guestworker or temporary worker programs. However, we believe that there should be no new guestworker program or any expansion of the number of lawful residents in our country until the Executive Branch better enforces current immigration laws.

“History has shown that enforcement provisions are ignored and underfunded while guestworker and amnesty provisions are always implemented.

“The 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act contained amnesties for farm workers and other illegal aliens as well as employer sanctions and other enforcement provisions. Unfortunately, the amnesties were carried out and the enforcement was not.

“The 1996 Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act also contained enforcement provisions that were not implemented. For instance, the bill mandated the implementation of a national exit-entry tracking system for all aliens. Nine years later the exit-entry system is still not near completion…

“The American people need to see that the current laws against illegal immigration are being enforced before any guestworker program can be considered.”

At the time, Hostettler and Smith could find just 17 cosigners for their letter. But by 2007, when the amnesty juggernaut got rolling again, there was opposition from across the political spectrum. The warmed-over Senate immigration bill once again failed, even with Democrats controlling both houses—and Congress shorn of members like Hostettler.

Why then did Hostettler and the Republicans lose? The conventional wisdom says that the anti-amnesty campaign was a political liability, something that alienated Hispanic voters will motivating no significant constituency to vote Republican in compensating numbers.

But clearly that’s not the judgment most savvy politicians made. They voted the amnesty bill down not just in 2006 but also in 2007, despite Democratic control of Congress.

Red-state Democrats and Republicans running for reelection were among the most likely to oppose the various iterations of Bush-McCain-Kennedy. They knew which way the wind was blowing.

Also, hardly anybody outside of safe Democratic districts openly campaigned in favor of amnesty. While the substance of their positions varied, most candidates in competitive races used the rhetoric of border security and immigration enforcement.

Hostettler’s 2006 Democratic challenger, Brad Ellsworth, was a case in point. He did not campaign against the incumbent’s immigration stance. In fact, he mirrored it: Ellsworth opposed the 2006 amnesty bill and called for tighter enforcement. This Ellsworth statement could have come from Hostettler himself:

“I oppose granting amnesty to people who have broken the law by entering our country illegally.  Instead, we must stop the flow of illegal immigration, secure our borders, and enforce the laws already on the books

“A strong immigration policy starts with effective border control, so the Department of Homeland Security must be given the resources they need to secure our borders. This isn’t just an illegal immigration problem, it’s a homeland security problem. And Congress must address it.”

Unlike many politicians who ran for Congress using such rhetoric in 2006, Ellsworth has actually voted that way since taking office (though he hasn’t shown the same leadership on the issue as Hostettler—nor the same interest in more controversial issues like birthright citizenship or reducing legal immigration). Ellsworth has received an A-minus rating from Americans for Better Immigration. He has teamed up with fellow Democrat Heath Shuler on theSAVE Act, which promotes attrition through enforcement. And he introduced his own e-verify bill, the Legal Employment Verification Act.

It is therefore clear, despite open-borders propaganda to the contrary, that the immigration issue did not defeat Hostettler in 2006—nor did it lead to the Republicans’ loss of Congress. Democrats like Ellsworth read the politics of immigration, especially as it played in their own districts, exactly the same way.

It remains to be seen how the Republican Party will deal with immigration in the Age of Obama. Some Republicans will undoubtedly argue that the party is better off without principled voices like John Hostettler.

Former Congressman John Hostettler is running for the GOP nomination for the U.S. Senate in Indiana.

On April 22 there will be a one-day money blitz for the Hostettler for Senate campaign.

Please donate whatever you can, large or small, to his campaign that day, and spread the word to anyone you know who might want to help.

The campaign website will have a donation ticker of some kind up that day that will chart our progress.

Remember, a Hostettler win will be a major political event, an explosion if you will within the GOP and the Tea Party movement.  But he can only do so if you donate. So let’s light the fuse and help John out.

The donors who poured millions into Ron Paul’s presidential campaign coffers aren’t done yet. On Saturday, libertarian financier and commentator Peter Schiff raised more than $200,000 in a 24-hour “money bomb” as he continues to explore a bid for the Republican nomination to run against Sen. Chris Dodd (D-Conn.).

Having now collected more than $790,000 in campaign contributions since mid-July, the Ron Paul Republican Schiff is competitive financially with the frontrunners for the GOP nomination. Former Congressman Rob Simmons raised $754,000 through June 30 while former ambassador Tom Foley has taken in $528,000 since mid-June.

Schiff’s fundraising haul wasn’t the only reason libertarian-leaning Republicans had to cheer last week. Rand Paul, the ophthalmologist son of the 11-term Texas congressman and former presidential candidate, announced he was going to run for the Senate seat being vacated by Sen. Jim Bunning (R-KY). As in Schiff’s case, the party establishment has other plans — the heavy favorite for the GOP nomination is Secretary of State Trey Grayson — but Paul is likely to take after his father when it comes time for his own money bomb later this month.

As Ron Paul Republicans have slowly been making inroads within the party structure, Congressman Paul himself has been gaining in influence over the GOP. Every Republican in the House is a now a co-sponsor of his bill to audit the Federal Reserve. Mainstream conservatives quote liberally from Paul’s reading list, including Thomas Woods’ Meltdown and some of Schiff’s work, when grilling Obama Treasury officials about the economy.

Even on issues of war and peace, Paul isn’t always in the minority anymore. A handful of conservatives who supported the Iraq war, like Congressman Roscoe Bartlett (R-Md.), have joined him in questioning President Obama’s Afghanistan escalation. All but five Republicansvoted with Paul against the supplemental funding of Iraq and Afghanistan, including the entire leadership. They haven’t suddenly become noninterventionists — the issue for most Republicans was extraneous spending, not the wars themselves — but it is nevertheless a major departure from the party’s stance under President Bush.

It is of course the Obama administration and the financial meltdown that have given Paulian ideas a new resonance, not so much his dissent on the war. (Though Paul’s success in fundraising and attracting the kind of young voters who have been fleeing the GOP in droves has had an impact as well.) But efforts to expand this influence appeared to take a hit when South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford was found crying with his mistress in Argentina. Sanford was a possible bridge between the Ron Paul Republicans and the mainstream conservative movement — and, until his extramarital affair, a credible 2012 presidential contender.

Now with Sanford likely out of the running, Ron Paul Republicans will once again have to reach within their own ranks. Peter Schiff has been an apostle of economic doom who claims vindication in the current malaise. “Though the worst of the global financial crisis may have passed,” he wrote recently, “the real impact of the much more fundamental U.S. economic crisis has yet to be fully felt.” That fundamental crisis, in his view, is the result of massive debt, unsustainable government spending, and a reckless monetary policy that is undermining the dollar’s strength.

While Schiff advised Ron Paul’s Republican presidential campaign, Rand Paul got his start in politics supporting his father’s bids for public office. In both appearance and speech, he bears a striking resemblance to the elder Dr. Paul but is somewhat less old-fashioned. It is hard to imagine Ron Paul saying, as his son often does, that the Republican Party “has lost its mojo.”

Paul and Schiff have very different approaches to the GOP. In a speech to the Connecticut Libertarian Party, Schiff openly talked about using it as a vehicle for libertarian ideas because its electoral debacles make it ripe for a takeover. His theory is that a leader-less and idea-less major party could be reshaped faster than a minor party could be made politically viable.

Rand Paul is much more conciliatory toward regular Republicans. Like Grayson, he said he would not run unless Bunning retired. When the senator obliged, Paul announced on his Facebook page that he had “nothing but good things to say” about Bunning and thanked the outgoing senator for his vote against the bailout (politely leaving unmentioned Bunning’s vote for the Iraq war). Like his father, Paul is pro-life and would strip the federal courts of their jurisdiction over abortion.

The younger Paul is careful to present his foreign policy views in a way that could appeal to Republicans more hawkish than he. “Defending our Country is the most important function of the federal government,” Paul says on his website. “When we are threatened, it is the obligation of our representatives to unleash the full arsenal of power that is granted by and derived from free men and women.” While a defender of Congress’ sole constitutional authority to declare war, he acknowledges that there are times when the president “can and should make military responses without Congressional authority.”

“As a member of Congress,” the statement on his campaign site continues, “Dr. Rand Paul would have demanded and voted in the affirmative for a declaration of war with Afghanistan. He would have demanded and voted against a declaration of war with Iraq.” He is similarly judicious on defense expenditures: “In Rand’s proposed budget, defense spending would represent a larger percentage of the total budget than it does today, while military spending on unnecessary programs and unconstitutional operations would be eliminated.”

Do these men have a chance? Several promising Ron Paul Republicans — and at least one Ron Paul Democrat – won their primaries in 2008 but went down to defeat. Murray Sabrin finished third in New Jersey’s GOP primary last year. Despite their fundraising prowess, some Paulites have found fiat currency also to be of little value at the ballot box.

In July, a Quinnipiac poll showed Schiff within five points of Dodd as the Republican nominee — but not registering at all among GOP primary voters. Like his father, Paul has done well in Internet polls but no scientific survey has yet tested his viability. Nevertheless, they are both serious libertarian candidates in competitive Senate races. No wonder they are taking the liberty to run.