With Roger Wicker being named a United States Senator, there is an opening on the Appropriations Committee for the U.S. House of Representatives. The Republicans get the fill the seat. The Republican leadership has a great opportunity to prove that it is serious about earmark reform and a conservative approach to spending. Its time to put some action behind their rhetoric.

Rep. Tom Cole, the Chairman of the NRCC, the campaign arm of the House Republicans, claims that putting him on the Appropriations Committee will help improve Republican fundraising successes. That, in and of itself, should tell you everything you need to know about why Tom Cole is a poor choice.

We encourage you to call your Republican member of Congress (or the closest one to you if you don’t have one) and encourage them to support Rep. Jeff Flake for the Appropriations Committee.

The GOP will not earn the trust of voters again, until the GOP proves it is fiscally responsible. Jeff Flake has led the fight on the House floor against earmarks and wasteful spending. Jeff Flake gets it. Our party needs Jeff Flake as the face for reform on the Appropriations Committee. He is also one of the few men who could change the committee instead of the committee changing him.

The way this will work is the Republican Steering Committee will nominate someone. Generally, the Republican Conference as a whole rubber stamps that nomination. But it does not have to be that way. Already, Republican back benchers and members of the Republican Study Committee are gearing up for a fight to nominate Jeff Flake.

If the Steering Committee does not nominate Flake, the Conference can. Let’s help them out. Call your Republican member of Congress and encourage him or her to support Jeff Flake.

We will not take back the House of Representatives until we’ve taken back our principles. Jeff Flake on Appropriations is a good first step. As we said at the top of this post, the Republican leadership has a great opportunity to prove that it is serious about earmark reform and a conservative approach to spending. Its time to put some action behind their rhetoric.

When we started RedState in May of 2004, we used a website program called Scoop the same program a lot of similar sites on the left used. But, as the number of visitors to our site grew, Scoop kept crashing on us.

If wed been a liberal website, we would have been able to fix the problem quickly and relatively cheaply. The online left loves Scoop. Unfortunately, there werent really any conservative Scoop developers out there to help us. We kept crashing and were out of money. We had to close down or take drastic action.

Well, we didnt close down. We ditched Scoop and moved to the best alternative at the time, a program called Drupal. But, in accomplishing the switch, budget constraints forced us to sacrifice some popular site features in order to alleviate the strain on our overused servers.

Needless to say, we always regarded those downgrades as temporary, and we hoped to restore the eliminated features and to add new and even better ones as soon as we could afford to.

Unfortunately, we still cant afford to. But were convinced that America can afford even less to have us operating at anything less than our absolute peak potential during the coming presidential election season.

So weve decided to move ahead with our upgrades without delay, and despite not having the cash on hand hoping and praying that RedState.com readers like you will help us make up the shortfall with a generous donation.

Please read on for a preview and more begging . . .

Turnout looks high… 500,000!

It seems Ds are running out of ballots. That means in both IA and NH (swing states), Ds may be showing a major enthusiasm gap. Rs should start at least acknowledging that they may be facing another 2006. Nothing is set in stone, but it seems the Ds are starting with a significant advantage in 2008.

Put your comments, attacks, analysis, etc here.

[UPDATE 6:12 PM]: FoxNews just announced an election day poll (not an exit poll). I didn’t catch all of it, but here is what I saw:

McCain 35
Romney 34
Huck 12

Independents saying the are voting:
Repub 41
Demo 59

Is voting in R primary went:
McCain 36
Romney 24

The reporter said Romney leads in the oldest age bracket and McCain led among other age brackets.

Please let me know if any of these numbers are off, I’m doing it by memory.

McCain: 33%

Romney: 30%

Huckabee: 17%

Giuliani: 10%

Paul: 7%

Thompson: 3%

Obama: 45%

Clinton: 30%

Edwards: 22%

Richardson: 2%

Kucinich: 1%

I have nothing to add to this other than “Read The Whole Thing.” But I’ll be glad to give you a snippet:

AT SATURDAY’S New Hampshire debate, Democratic candidates were confronted with a question that they have been ducking for some time: Can they concede that the “surge” of U.S. troops in Iraq has worked? All of them vehemently opposed the troop increase when President Bush proposed it a year ago; both Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama introduced legislation to reverse it. Now it’s indisputable that the surge has drastically reduced violence. Attacks have fallen by more than 60 percent, al-Qaeda has been dealt a major blow, and the threat of sectarian civil war that seemed imminent a year ago has receded. The monthly total of U.S. fatalities in December was the second-lowest of the war.

A reasonable response to these facts might involve an acknowledgment of the remarkable military progress, coupled with a reminder that the final goal of the surge set out by President Bush — political accords among Iraq’s competing factions — has not been reached. (That happens to be our reaction to a campaign that we greeted with skepticism a year ago.) It also would involve a willingness by the candidates to reconsider their long-standing plans to carry out a rapid withdrawal of remaining U.S. forces in Iraq as soon as they become president — a step that would almost certainly reverse the progress that has been made.

What Ms. Clinton, Mr. Obama, John Edwards and Bill Richardson instead offered was an exclusive focus on the Iraqi political failures — coupled with a blizzard of assertions about the war that were at best unfounded and in several cases simply false. Mr. Obama led the way, claiming that Sunni tribes in Anbar province joined forces with U.S. troops against al-Qaeda in response to the Democratic victory in the 2006 elections — a far-fetched assertion for which he offered no evidence.

Dear Governor Huckabee,

Remember when I told you not to do this?

Well, this is what happens when you don’t listen to me.

Time to mend some fences, I’d say.

From Mike Huckabee’s website:

LITTLE ROCK, AR — Former Arkansas Governor and Presidential candidate Mike Huckabee has issued the following comment in response to a Washington Times article reporting he would amend the Constitution in connection to children born in the U.S. to illegal aliens:

“I do not support an amendment to the Constitution that would prevent children born in the U.S. to illegal aliens from automatically becoming American citizens. I have no intention of supporting a constitutional amendment to deny birthright citizenship.”

Good for Mike Huckabee. All politics involves some pandering, but this seemed like a particularly egregious example when I first read about it. I look forward to an explanation from the Washington Times or someone as to how they got the idea that Huckabee supported such an amendment.