And I agree that all those undocumented jihadies, I mean workers should become citizens. I mean why obey the laws of the USA? Aren’t we all better off when we reward those who brake rigid, inflexible laws?

Right now the best defenders of a decent welfare state that is consistent with broadly rising living standards are people like Paul Ryan, Mitch Daniels, Yuval Levin and Reihan Salam.

My head tells me eight Republican pick ups in the Senate, but my gut (and an unscientific sense that Senate Republican candidates will tend to outperform their poll numbers) tells me nine.

You are right that Obama’s popularity is holding up fine under very difficult circumstances. A year of gridlock doesn’t really serve conservative goals (though it is the best we can reasonably hope for on the really big things.) The problem is that even a modest recovery coupled with the different turnout model of 2012 and the slow (but steady) demographic transformation of America puts Obama in a good place to win reelection and maybe make up for some of the congressional losses of this year.

The big Republican challenge is to put choices to Obama that force him to either hurt his popularity or agree to move the country in a positive direction on issues like health care (repeal is something they should argue for, but is not enough.) That would require well thought-out policies and a plan for selling them to the broad public. I see no reason to believe that the Republican congressional leadership is up to this challenge. I don’t like their chances in a public relations fight with Obama in a circumstance where the Republicans are seen as having some responsibility.

But we’ll see.

How do we do “divided” gummint when one pole of the tension is ‘republicanism’ and the other a highly centralized statism?
That is the Democratic Party is one that eschews the traditional ‘American’ virtues and embraces the old, tired, and murderous psycho-pathologies of the past century. I can’t see how there can be a dialectic between the Democrats and this new batch of conservative, American, Republicans. Politically, perhaps literally, one or the other has to be crushed.

However, ‘divided’ gummint, assuming the conversation was grounded on intrinsic American principles rather than Marxist ones, would prevent our Kenyan-Marxist president from continuing his agenda to create an all but enslaved proletariat.

If someone could explain to me how a Catholic, indeed any Christian could, without sin, be a member of a political party that kills its young, I’d appreciate it. If the bishops seek to do God’s will they would excommunicate any Catholic who was a member of the Democrat Party. It’s that ‘Imago Dei’ thing.

And finally, anyone living in this country ‘illegally’ should be arrested and deported. However, Peter’s correct in his critique of the Porchers. The first step to freedom is having the means of existing without standing in a gummint queue, and that means capitalism.