Some thoughts on the last few days...

Well, I have gone through a few headlines and I think this has been a good week for the conservative movement. We have had an anti-entitlement candidate step forward for House Majority Leader; currently he's the fourth ranking member, I believe. He is John Shadegg of Arizona, and he makes more sense to me than the other candidates, and I am from Missouri, where our decrepit road system could sure use some governmental largesse. If Roy Blunt wins, our state will benefit, but it seems the country will be worse off. He is just too close to the Abramoff scanfal and to Tom DeLay. I've got to back Shadegg.
How about some deep thoughts? Peggy Noonan over at the Wall Street Journal always has some, and today she lays out some of her best thinking(http://www.opinionjournal.com/columnists/pnoonan/?id=110007835). She basically lays it on the line for the leaders of the conservative movement, to step up and make sure that the Republican Party is clean, because it is obvious that the Democrats cannot be trusted with the leadership of this country. In fact, she lays out the supposed ideals of the Republican Party:

"That it regain a sense of its historic mission. That it stop seeming the friend of the wired and return to being the great friend of Main Street, for Main Street still, in its own way, exists. That it return to basic principles on spending, regulation and state authority. That it question a foreign policy that often seems at once dreamy and aggressive, and question, too, an overreaching on immigration policy that seems composed in equal parts of naiveté and cynicism. That its representatives admit that lunching with lobbyists is not the problem; failing to oppose the growth of government--so huge that no one, really no one, knows what is in its budget--is. That they reduce the size and power of government. That they help our country."

You should do yourself a favor and read the whole thing.
In other news, Senate Minority Leader Reid chose to apologize for the fact that his office issued a report which criticized Republicans for being complicit in the Abramoff scandal. This was mainly because he has taken money associated with Abramoff himself. That hasn't stopped the other Dems in the Senate, though. However, this whole lobbying scandal reflects the greater problems of porkbarrel spending and influence peddling, two concerns that continue to worsen every year, with most parts of the government involved in some fashion or another. The whole system needs to recommit itself to making sure things function as ethically clean as possible, although with money and human nature involved, these problems will never completely disappear.
Oh, and maybe you saw something about that new Bin Laden tape? It concerns me, but not really. We kill three of his lieutenants and all the sudden he wants to talk about a truce? Now I just wish the Democrats and the ACLU would explain why we shouldn't check out random phone calls to and from Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iran or Iraq. Seems like a good idea to me, particularly if the crazies over there want to threaten more violence against our country. At least France has suddenly realized that they have cojones too, and Chirac said so in no uncertain terms, threatening nuclear retaliation against the suspected originator of a terrorist attack against France. Now if we can only get them to care about Spain and the UK, and maybe the US, then we will be getting somewhere. The world will have to deal with the Iran situation, or things will get very messy in a hurry once they go nuclear. The more countries involved, the easier it will be, and the easier it will be to win or get the Iranian radicals to back way the hell down. The world can survive an oil shortage again, but a nuclear exchange over the world's oil supply would be unimaginably worse.