Thank you, ma'am!

Fourth of July is going to be a little bit sweeter, thanks to a wonderful lady in Albuquerque, N.M., who hit the tip jar today. She included with her contribution a note:

We need reminders about calling the 8 traitors and the RNC. . . .

This was obviously a response to the Not One Red Cent answer to the Waxman-Markey Eight. Now, it happens that she hit the tip jar just before I posted my solicitation of $20 contributions, and when I saw the amount of her donation, I felt compelled to send her an e-mail:

Ma'am: The contribution said $200 -- that's not an accidental extra zero, is it? Either way, I'm grateful for your generosity, but wanted to make sure I wasn't taking advantage of an error.

To which she quickly replied:

Not an error. I am divying up the money I would usually give the national Republicans. They are getting no more from me. Keep the fight going!

Well . . . Heh. I wrote back to tell the generous lady that the fight would most certainly continue, and added that she was an answer to prayer. Before I could even ask, God answered tenfold.

I'm still a few Jacksons shy of my goal, so don't any of you other would-be tipjar-hitters think you're off the hook. Hit me, baby.

Which brings me to my good friend Dan Riehl's criticism that withholding money from the national committees will "only make the problem worse."

That depends, I suppose, on what you consider "the problem" to be. I'm having a very difficult time conceiving how the problem I'm talking about could get "worse."

The Not One Red Cent rebellion is not a tantrum, nor an atavistic gesture, but the only means remaining by which the conservative grassroots can attempt to communicate to the clueless tone-deaf assclowns at GOP-HQ -- did you hear us yet, John Cornyn? -- that their reign of idiocy is at an end.

To quote a country song, the whiskey ain't workin' anymore. And really, it never worked in the first place.

So long as the Democrats were listening to their own clueless tone-deaf assclowns (by which I mean Bob Shrum) and the conservative grassroots were fired up, GOP-HQ could get away with a fair amount of recto-cranial inversion. It is impossible to name a Republican who wouldn't have gotten at least 51% in a national election against John Freaking Kerry, especially with notorious assclown Bob Shrum running the Kerry campaign.

Yet the idiots at GOP-HQ apparently decided that the successful results of the 2004 election qualified them as omniscient political geniuses who could do no wrong. The back-to-back disasters of 2006 and '08 exposed the fallacy of that theory.

Having won elections on the backs of the grassroots -- who manned the phone lines and canvassed the precincts -- the GOP leadership believed itself so superior that they didn't need the grassroots anymore. Ah, but the grassroots are not nearly so stupid as the soi-dissant "leadership" imagines.

Whose name was listed as sponsor of S. 2611? You didn't think we'd forget something like that, did you? Words can scarcely describe the joy of knowing that, whoever wins next year's Pennsylvania Senate election, it won't be Arlen Specter.

The grassroots can always find new leaders. If the leaders think they can repeatedly betray the grassroots without consequence, they'd better think again.

What's wrong at GOP-HQ? Basically, they've forgotten whose party it is. A political party is not the property of elected officials, but of the people who elected them. How else to explain Cornyn's decision that he -- and not Republican primary voters -- should choose the party's Senate candidate in Florida?

At least Cornyn is an elected official. Not so the strategists and consultants and other hired hands whose wrongheaded advice leads to such disastrous moves as the national committee trying to handpick a senator in a key state 15 months before the primary.

Those consultants are getting paid good money to tell Republican leaders how to destroy their party. That lady in New Mexico says, Not One Red Cent. If John Cornyn isn't listening to that lady now, I guarantee that on the morning of Nov. 3, 2010, he'll wish he had. Because there are many, many thousands of grassroots conservatives who feel the same way. (And they should hit the tip jar, too.)

In the words of a famous Cuban-American, Mr. Cornyn, Say hello to my leetle friend:

Good luck beating that with Charlie Crist. Having demonstrated that Cornyn has backed the losing horse in Florida, let's reiterate what I said in my letter to the NRCC's Pete Sessions:

On a close vote of such tremendous importance, one of the last-resort means of enforcing party discipline is for leaders to inform wavering caucus members that those who defy the leadership by voting with the other party will thereby forfeit financial support for their future re-election campaigns. If the NRCC failed to deliver such a message to the eight Republicans who voted for Waxman-Markey, then this is a failure for which the NRCC must be held accountable.

This was a bad bill for which no one could vote with a clean conscience, and no Republican should have voted for it. Guarantee you if Tom DeLay were still in Congress, there would have been eight dead Republicans in the cloakroom before there would have been eight Republican votes for the Monstrosity From Hell That Will Destroy the American Economy.

The NRCC must publicly repudiate the Waxman-Markey Eight, and I'm not seeing any press releases yet, so therefore . .

NOT ONE RED CENT!

And HIT THE TIP JAR!

UPDATE: I'd already linked Donald Douglas twice on this, but Cornyn's pet Charlie Crist is in a dead heat with Marco Rubio among voters who know both. The awesome power of NRCC's endorsement is not exactly impressive, is it?